Rachel Gogel (she/her) is a San Francisco-based queer creative director, designer, and educator. She runs her own consultancy as an ‘independent creative culture officer’ where her approach is informed by her experiences both in-house and on the agency side. Her impressive skill sets range from branding, strategy, and design management to art direction, editorial, and product design.
During her career, Rachel has continuously used design as a tool for change — from building multidisciplinary teams at The New York Times’ T Brand, GQ, and Meta to launching story-driven experiences at Airbnb, Departures, and Godfrey Dadich. She’s led projects ranging from developing global brand systems to scaling creative operations. Most recently, Rachel helped shape Dropbox Design’s internal critique culture and developed brand identities for academic institutions. Nominated for a 2022 Webby for her work on Departures, she was also recognized by Inc. as one of 2016’s “30 under 30 Movers and Shakers” and by Forbes as one of 2015’s “30 Under 30” in media.
Beyond this, Rachel also seeks to influence the next creative generation as a design educator at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and the School of The New York Times (NYTEdu). At CCA specifically, she teaches courses called “Leadership by Design” and “Designing Your Career” for graduate students completing their Master’s degree in HCI Design.
Rachel is Chair of the Women in Leadership & Design (WILD) on the AIGA SF Board of Directors, an active member of Queer Design Club, and she previously served on the board of The Society of Publication Designers. All these platforms amplify Rachel’s commitment to supporting women and nonbinary-led causes and addressing gender-based disparities in the design industry. She passionately believes in “fostering inclusive spaces that unlock human potential.”
As Rachel tells us, “I’ve always cared about using my power, privilege, and voice to help create inclusive and connected communities. Actually, one of the reasons I finally decided to launch my own business is that only 0.1% of creative agencies are founded by women, and the numbers are even smaller for women / nonbinary people of colour and those who identify as queer. As the WILD Chair and as an active member of Women Talk Design, I am determined to change this ratio. In fact, I am looking for a resourceful partner to conduct an official recount because this statistic feels very low and inaccurate based on my recent observations.”
We recently talked with Rachel to find out more about her career journey, challenges she’s overcome and what changes she would like to see that would create a more equal and diverse creative industry for the future.
What initially led you to become interested in a career in design?
Being born and raised in Paris, France, exposed me to art and design at a young age without me fully appreciating it. I was privileged to travel around the world thanks to my dad’s job at the time, which I’m sure subconsciously affected my critical eye and craft sensibilities. I was also passionate about design before knowing what ‘Design’ really was, buying magazines at airports for long-distance flights, for example, introduced me to a variety of editorial design and typography. That’s when my collection of printed ephemera kicked off.
While at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, USA, studying for a liberal arts degree with a design concentration, I volunteered for campus groups designing flyers and made self-initiated projects like zines and basic websites. I’m still proud of my senior thesis titled “12/22/08 – 03/05/09,” an 8 ft. x 8 ft. art piece composed of newsprint wheat pasted on birch wood, which is actually part of Annenberg’s permanent collection (in case you’re wondering, that’s about 244 x 244 centimeters). After following the news closely for three months, I remember identifying patterns, appropriating portraits of those mentioned the most, and then creating 200+ graphics that I printed and arranged alphabetically in a grid based on the first letter of the person’s first name. I wanted to take politically and socially charged issues and reinterpret them, ultimately enabling viewers to reassess the news with which they were presented.
Becoming friends with business students while attending university also rubbed off on me, for example, how to turn my artistic passion into a profitable stream of income, how to marry strategy and execution, and to put it simply, how to navigate the real world ahead of me. While still in college, I was lucky to land internships at magazines (MIXTE Magazine and Condé Nast’s Golf Digest) and an agency (Paganucci Wolfington, now PlayWorkGroup). Soon after, I decided to pursue a career in publishing — my first dream job. I read all kinds of magazines for design inspiration — WIRED, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine.
A few weeks prior to college graduation, I stumbled upon the inaugural two-week School of Visual Arts (SVA) Design Summer Masters Workshop in Italy led by a well-known design critic and historian Steven Heller, his wife and famous typographer Louise Fili, and amazing educator Lita Talarico. I applied hoping that I would get inspired, immerse myself within the design community, and build long-lasting connections that could eventually help me get a full-time offer.
On my return, I moved to New York jobless (due to the recession) to seek employment. I finally earned an internship at Diane von Furstenberg’s (DVF) studio. After my DVF internship, I had a few short stints at Travel + Leisure and NBC before GQ became a freelance client of mine. Flash forward to summer of 2011: I was hired full-time as associate art director on the business side of the publication. I learned so much and was inspired every day until I left as design director of marketing in 2014 for a new gig at The New York Times.
This was just the beginning of my career journey, and my dreams have evolved ever since.
Can you tell us about your career path, the various roles you’ve worked in and how you’ve got to where you are now?
These days, if I’m not practicing self-care, traveling, or hanging out with my wife and cat at home in San Francisco, California, my time is spent consulting for brands, teaching, speaking, volunteering, and mentoring.
Since late 2020, I’ve been running my own independent consultancy, where my approach is informed by experiences both in-house and on the agency side. Over the last fifteen years, I have continued to use design as a tool for change — from building multidisciplinary teams at The New York Times’ award-winning T Brand and Meta to launching story-driven experiences at GQ Magazine and Godfrey Dadich Partners.
I’ve held titles ranging from design director and creative director to executive creative director and head of creative. Now as a solopreneur, I’ve been able to influence many exciting initiatives including: Internal brand/culture programs at Dropbox Design and Airbnb, a magazine called MYLES, TV pitches for SNL executives, and multiple brand identity systems (such as American Express’ Departures and, most recently, Allbritton Journalism Institute.) My work for Departures was even nominated for a 2022 Webby. While I am a design craft nerd, I also really value all things operational.
Beyond this, I seek to influence the next generation as a design educator at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and the School of The New York Times (NYTEdu). At CCA, I teach classes for graduate students completing their Master’s degree in Human Computer Interaction Design called “Designing Your Career” and “Leadership by Design”. I’m also planning on putting together an on-demand version of my “Designing Your Career” course through Maven, so stay tuned.
I’ve had the honor of speaking at a number of conferences, events, and schools. I actively contribute to the design discourse by also being a guest on podcasts, judging award competitions and portfolio reviews, and facilitating personalized workshops for my clients.
Since November 2021, I have been the Women in Leadership & Design (WILD) Chair on the AIGA San Francisco Board of Directors. I’m happy to dig into this initiative a little later on.
Finally, I am part of a global community of mentors through the ADPList. These conversations are a great way to give back to the design community. Also, as a member of Queer Design Club, it’s important for me to make myself available to all, especially self-identifying women, non-binary folx, and queer creatives.
Have there been any key pivotal moments in your career that have helped you to develop?
In 2011, I launched my own newsletter for creative job seekers called: “Creative Jobs. The List.” As my career started to fast track, people would reach out by email looking for referrals. Instead of being the middle woman (or committing to a full-on recruiter life), I decided to find a more efficient way to refer people indirectly. It was a priority to keep it free for both job seekers and employers. In just a few hours, I created a Mailchimp template and voilà! Over a few years, it grew through word of mouth from 60 subscribers (my own network at the time) to almost 3,000, and it was amazing to hear so many success stories. Not only did I help people land jobs, but I even got a few interviews myself through this. When I moved to California to work at Meta, I couldn’t really maintain it anymore, plus it featured mostly New York-based positions.
This may sound obvious, but the design industry is quite incestuous, so relationships and community are everything. I truly didn’t realize that by doing this, my network would grow and I would develop a certain reputation. In fact, I still get requests to share a job listing now and again.
“This may sound obvious, but the design industry is quite incestuous, so relationships and community are everything.”
What does your current role as an Independent Creative Culture Officer involve?
While I became my own boss in October 2020, I only made it official last February 2022 by forming my LLC (thanks to the Collective) with an S corporation status. This enabled me to become a founder legally and put myself on a monthly payroll for stability. As a self-employed consultant, I have fully embraced the term contractor (instead of freelancer). In my experience, most contractors rarely get to be in creative leadership positions, especially in a part-time capacity, but I’ve been able to figure out how to keep doing what I love without being full-time: I’ve been able to build and lead teams in a very embedded way and influence work. This is what many refer to as a fractional creative executive.
I believe in fostering inclusive spaces that unlock human potential. While my formal training is in graphic design, I am committed to helping brands retain their integrity in a world demanding disruption — and I thrive when I’m shaping teams, whether building them from scratch (O -> 1) or fixing them for the next evolution of a company. I guess you could say that I ‘design’ how people work and actively seek to connect organizational culture with internal brand.
My job as a creative leader has always been to find the balance between designing a safe environment that inspires productivity and nurturing each individual’s professional advancement. The hope is also to encourage people to think (and design) differently. When people feel they have a strong relationship with their leader because their leader is deeply invested in who they are, they’re willing to offer their best work.
“My job as a creative leader has always been to find the balance between designing a safe environment that inspires productivity and nurturing each individual’s professional advancement. The hope is also to encourage people to think (and design) differently.”
Can you tell us about any standout projects that you’ve worked on and why they’re important to you?
I’m most proud of the teams that I’ve built to support important brand initiatives. I love figuring out the right structure, identifying the talent required to address a business need, and then talking to a range of people with various perspectives before deciding on who to invest in long term. As a design leader, I believe that you don’t manage the creative process, you enable it.
In terms of specific design projects, there are a few that stand out:
GQ Live! App — In 2012, I launched and managed GQ Live!, a first-to-market augmented reality (AR) app, which transformed GQ’s print-to-mobile landscape. This was a time when consumers were starting to move their lives to the mobile space. We brought to life 237 pages in the September 2012 issue (almost all page’s cover-to-cover) and we were able to optimize our print business while leveraging interactive print as a consumption driver. For a while, we had an average of 250 downloads of the app per day! This experiment eventually earned us a Mobile Excellence Award in 2013 and several other publications followed in our path with their own branded scanners.
T Brand Studio x Netflix: “Orange is The New Black” Digital Paid Post — This Paid Post was commissioned by Netflix to promote season 2 of its hit series “Orange Is The New Black” (OITNB) and revolutionized the branded content space. It tackled an important topic: The demand for policies and programs that meet the needs of women in prison. Our job at T Brand Studio, The New York Times’ in-house content studio, was to find more organic ways to integrate the show and the brand. We did this by interviewing the author of the prison memoir Piper Kerman, and highlighting issues presented in OITNB along with elements of the show’s color palette — most notably the infamous orange prison uniforms. It was described as the new “Snow Fall” in advertising (referring to a NYTimes editorial piece from 2012 that became a popular new term to describe what our ad clients wanted their digital campaigns to look like). The final interactive piece, “Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work”, flows as you scroll, presenting moving images that synchronize with the text to immerse you in the issues faced by incarcerated women. While the article feels a little ‘dated’ now, it garnered a lot of attention when it went live almost a decade ago.
Beyond these two initiatives, other more recent examples include: Building and shipping visual systems for (then) 2 billion users on the Facebook app, co-creating Netflix’s “Abstract: The Art of Design” season 2 key art and promotional materials with the legendary Scott Dadich and other key partners at Godfrey Dadich Partners; reimagining Departures’new publishing infrastructure within an agency context, and designing the employee-facing digital experience for Airbnb’s popular Live and Work Anywhere program.
Are there any barriers or challenges that you have faced during your career and how have you overcome them?
I’ve always been conscious of my age and gender. I was 22 or 23 years old when I got my leadership role at GQ Magazine. Up until that point, I had been an individual contributor (IC) on a steady path as a junior designer. I was suddenly shifted to a management track as the associate art director of the magazine’s marketing art department. I was hired to lead a team of people older than me and work under a pretty well-known creative director, although he left shortly after I joined. These early years as a people manager made me realize quickly how much I loved this side of the job. And while I was considered ‘young’ to hold these types of roles, I tried to focus on what a person could contribute, not on how old they were. I left Condé Nast as design director, and was hired as a creative director at The New York Times and have been in that kind of role ever since.
That being said, I was intensely aware of my age and was often reminded of it. Most of my bosses were men, and while some of them weren’t that much older than me, they enjoyed reminding me about how grateful I should be to hold the positions that I had, especially at my age. And while I was indeed grateful, I worked hard and earned every title and promotion just like everybody else. Even if this meant I didn’t have as much work experience as others holding similar roles around me.
Ever since leaving my full-time job a few years ago and becoming my own boss, I haven’t thought as much about my age. However, I do think ageism is still a reality in most workplaces and it goes both ways — both people who are ‘too young’ are considered inexperienced and those who are considered ‘too old’ are supposed to want to retire. And unfortunately, while some progress has been made, women are still being forced out of the industry more often than men. This actually naturally brings us to the topic of gender, which for me has often been coupled with my relative youth.
I know that women make up over half the design industry, and yet, there are still so few represented at the top. So many systemic issues have led to more design leadership roles being taken by men. In fact, the initial promotion to manager is one of the biggest obstacles women face on their career ladder. And even though research suggests that diversity in leadership at creative agencies drives profit, only 29% of creative director positions across our industry in the US are held by women. And even less by people of color. What still blows my mind is that it’s perfectly plausible that a female graphic designer might never work under a female creative director. In fact, 70% of young female creatives say they have never worked under a female creative director. This, to me, just confirms the concept of “you can’t be what you can’t see.”
“ What still blows my mind is that it’s perfectly plausible that a female graphic designer might never work under a female creative director. In fact, 70% of young female creatives say they have never worked under a female creative director. This, to me, just confirms the concept of “you can’t be what you can’t see.”
Being a woman in this industry has definitely come with some hardships. I have been challenged during salary negotiations and requests for promotions, have received comments about being “too expensive” by clients, and have experienced micro-aggressions. My involvement with AIGA SF’s WILD is one way I’ve navigated these gendered biases, but I encourage women at every stage of their careers to talk more openly about money so that they can help each other get paid more and rise to leadership positions.
Also, as a queer designer, I recognize my privilege knowing that my sexuality has not been an issue for me in my career. While I was coming out in my mid-to late 20s, I moved to San Francisco and worked at a company that embraced my authentic self. I know that being bisexual (and married to a woman) is still not accepted everywhere, and I remind myself not to take that for granted.
“Being a woman in this industry has definitely come with some hardships. I have been challenged during salary negotiations and requests for promotions, have received comments about being “too expensive” by clients, and have experienced micro-aggressions. My involvement with AIGA SF’s WILD is one way I’ve navigated these gendered biases…”
Can you tell us about the Women in Leadership & Design (WILD) project and what your role involves?
A year and a half ago, I was appointed the Women in Leadership & Design (also known as WILD) Chair on the AIGA SF Board of Directors. With an acronym like WILD, how can you not want to get involved? I’m proud to say that I’ve built an amazing volunteer-led committee from the ground up and we’ve been re-engaging the local design community in new, exciting ways — such as meetups throughout the city and a diverse speaker series. I’ve always been passionate about addressing gender-based disparities in the design industry, and this is just one way that I’ve been able to influence the discourse around this topic. If you’re interested in learning more, you can follow WILD on Instagram and LinkedIn.
I’ve spent over a decade hoping that I can put something out in the world that matters. I’ve looked for ways to get involved and support women-led initiatives such as: Walking the runway for New York Fashion Week in 2015 for Carrie Hammer’s initiative called “Role Models, Not Runway Models”, facilitating a trip to Israel with a select group of women featured on Forbes’ 30 under 30 list, doing an Instagram Story takeover for The 3% Movement during the 2019 San Francisco Pride Parade, participating in an amazing Lululemon initiative with 19 other Bay Area-based women, or inspiring other queer women by holding leadership roles in my industry.
What changes would you like to see that would create a more equal and diverse creative industry for the future?
As a white woman living in America, there’s still so much listening, learning, and unlearning that I need to do in order to fight systematic inequality. Now more than ever, we need urgently to advance racial equity in our design teams, lead conversations on sensitive topics, and foster engagement instead of retreat. With more distributed-first models, we can ensure that our teams — no matter their employment contract status or location — more accurately reflect the diverse populations that we aim to serve. If we truly want to decolonize the graphic design industry, it will require everyone to act.
It’s also important to acknowledge that there is still a yawning gap in the sense of belonging at work between white people and people of color. As managers and leaders, we’ll have to be vigilant of bias towards those who do come back to the physical office; remote workers fear that in a more hybrid office, they will be left behind and get fewer promotions. Flexibility makes a big difference in inclusion. Millions of immigrants, older workers, and mothers are missing from the labor force right now. A flexible approach is also beneficial for introverts, caregivers, geographically remote populations, and disabled people. In fact, as author and facilitation guru Priya Parker suggests, we as leaders should “pose a question too rarely asked of workplaces: ‘What is worthy of our collective time?’” The idea is that work isn’t something people come to the office for, it’s something they do. And the good news is that neither creativity nor collaboration are weakened by distance — they’re merely altered. The conditions that make them possible remain the same. Successful collaboration on a team still depends on integrity, trust, psychological safety, and the open exchange of diverse perspectives and expertise.
“…the good news is that neither creativity nor collaboration are weakened by distance — they’re merely altered. The conditions that make them possible remain the same. Successful collaboration on a team still depends on integrity, trust, psychological safety, and the open exchange of diverse perspectives and expertise.”
Beyond this, I believe that more inclusive design and leadership practices are good for business and, simply put, it’s just the right thing to do.
On the creation front, accessibility and ethical standards should be baked into all work that we touch from the beginning, not a requirement that is checked off once the project is complete. It’s essential to understand the implications of all of our creative decisions (especially with AI tools becoming more mainstream), from the people we portray and the language we use to the collaborators and professionals we hire and our cultural references. If we’re not thinking about these critical elements, then we’re not thinking about the full user experience. This is important whether you’re serving a global audience or not. Even a very small segment of the population has different needs.
On the leadership front, building teams that reflect the expansive needs of your audience is critical. The idea here is that the more perspectives on solving the problem, the better the outcome.
I believe that we can effectively design a more equitable future if we want to. That’s the future of design leadership that I want to be part of and help shape. That’s ‘the future of independent work’ we should be getting ready for.
What advice do you have for designers and creatives looking to progress in their careers?
Negotiation will earn you respect and at a certain level is expected. Statistically speaking, women are not negotiating as much as men are. Unfortunately, the problem of defining the value of a creative service is lacking in design education. Having a benchmark for my self-worth was crucial in overcoming my impulse to undercharge to begin with. I now increase my rates slightly for every client project I take on. It really comes down to what you think the work deserves and being brave enough to ask for it. Money is such a weird taboo thing, especially in this kind of work. Creativity has always been undervalued and is often not taken seriously by the corporate world — but is that really fair? We’re in a field where all of these amazing artists are competing with one another and making less money off the bat, especially because we continue to undersell ourselves. We should be encouraging everyone to talk more openly about money, especially (queer) women.
“Negotiation will earn you respect and at a certain level is expected. Statistically speaking, women are not negotiating as much as men are. Unfortunately, the problem of defining the value of a creative service is lacking in design education. Having a benchmark for my self-worth was crucial in overcoming my impulse to undercharge to begin with.”