Maya is an author and multi-hyphenate creative leader based in the San Fransico Bay Area, specializing in art direction, brand design, and illustration. Today, she's a Brand Design Lead at Yahoo, but she also worked at Lyft, Asana, and Square. WAY before working at any of those places, she spent the weekends at her grandmother's playing Sonic the Hedgehog and drawing Powerpuff Girls and Sailor Moon. She's also obsessed with 80s, 90s, and early 2000s pop culture, and has an affinity for hard edges, shapes, color blocks, and vibrancy. Recently, and in response to the murder of George Floyd, Maya spent three years writing and illustrating her book called The Anti-Racist Vocab Guide: An Illustrated Introduction to Dismantling Anti-Blackness. An excellent resource to learn more about terms like assimilation, blackface, privilege, tokenism, and white supremacy.

Tune in for a talk about her career as an in-house designer in the tech industry, showcasing culture in your work, how writing grounds and influences her visual directions, and the salad bowl theory. Follow Maya on Instagram @mayaealey, find brand design on her website mayaealey.com, and buy her book, The Anti-Racist Vocab Guide: An Illustrated Introduction to Dismantling Anti-Blackness, online.

Questions for this interview.

• In general, how were you able to string together such a solid list of companies to work for? (And) Looking back, is there anything that you believe you did (really) well that helped you get those jobs?
• What would you say to a college student who’s hesitant to take an in-house job or a mid-career designer considering a transition from agency life? What’s waiting for them in the in-house world?
• If you had to start looking for a job tomorrow, what signs would you look for that tell you a company truly cares about creativity and design?
• You often start your process with words and emphasize writing over visuals. Why do you do that, and can you explain how that approach helps you shape your visual direction?
• What about the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s still speaks to you emotionally or visually?
• What advice would you give someone who wants to showcase culture in their work but doesn’t quite know how to incorporate it?
• Your mother emphasized the importance of your education and self-sufficiency. How have those ideas influenced your creative career over time?
• Can you give us some context behind why your book exists, what it’s a response to, and what you hope people take away from reading it?
• How did you balance clarity with depth, especially when simplifying terms that carry so much history and weight?
• Can you help us understand the difference between the salad bowl and melting pot theories?
• Suppose someone’s in the middle of an interview process and they’re concerned about a company's commitment to diversity. What can they do to figure out how important diversity is to the company they’re interviewing with? Or what would you do?
• What have the most inclusive environments done well to make you feel seen and supported?
• Are you still holding yourself back? Are you still on the journey to authenticity?

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