Design Identities will celebrate five Black Design alumni who have been influencers in their fields. Students from each department will conduct one on one interviews with an alumnus in their field to learn about their successes as designers and to encourage the next generation of students, especially BIPOC students, with an introduction to and an interest in design.
Interviews, portfolios of work, and backgrounds on each designer will be released weekly throughout February and the first week of March on the College of Design’s social media channels and on a dedicated webpage. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to see information on a new designer each week. Additional information can be found by visiting the Design programs website. Additional information can be found by visiting the College of Design’s website.
Reneé is an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of the Communication Design program at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. She is a graduate of the Graphic Design program at the University of Cincinnati in 2002 and received her Master’s from North Carolina State in 2008.
Reneé has been teaching typography, exhibition design, graphic design in the Communication Design program for the last fourteen years. Her students have won countless awards from Graphics, Graphic Design USA, and Creative Communication Awards Design competitions over the years.
Her research focuses on developing digital and physical tools that seek to address our society’s literacy problem. Currently, she has a company that sells her reading tool called See Words Reading®. Renee came up with See Words because a friend’s child who attributed his reading struggle to the letters’ layout on a page. Reneé, as a designer, felt that she could help with the problem. Renee is a Cincy Innovates winner and has been acknowledged as a Rising Tech star by ComSpark, awarded by the Business Courier Best Software of the Year, and the University of Cincinnati Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year. Recently, a font her team has designed called SeeType just won an STA award, and she has given a TEDx talk on Eradication Literacy Through the Power of a Font. Additionally, she is working in a collaborative research team awarded a grant from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to develop a tool to help correct speech problems in children.
Renee has also been named a winner in the Graphic Design USA Design competition for the poster she developed for the AIGA to promote voting.