Growing up in Europe as the daughter of a father in the military, Jacinda Walker fondly remembers sharing time with her highly creative mother. She still treasures several pieces they drew together when she was in fourth grade. The emphasis on creativity continued after they relocated to the U.S. and Jacinda attended Roxboro Middle School and Cleveland Heights High School.
“I’ve always known I was going to do something in the arts,” she says. “My mom would buy us sketchbooks, coloring books and the workbooks where you could solve puzzles; all of those things were fun activities that we did at home.”
A career in design never entered her thoughts until 10th grade, however, when a new art teacher who was a commercial artist focused more on design, typography, and layout than fine arts. Then, one day while working on a project in class, he suggested to Jacinda that she consider a career in graphic design.
“I honestly didn’t believe him because I felt it wasn’t a real job,” recalls the founder and creative director of designExplorr in Cleveland with a laugh. “I had never seen anyone who looked like me doing design work, and it wasn’t until I was in college that I began to think maybe this is going to be the thing for me.”
Enrolling at the University of Akron, she absolutely loved everything about pursuing an Associate’s Degree in Commercial Art. She took every art-and design-related course she could: drawing, painting, commercial photography, layout, marker rendering, watercolors, printmaking, etc.
As she neared completion of her two-year degree, her counselor advised her that, except for some general requirement courses, she had enough to earn a four-year degree. Jacinda stayed and earned a B.F.A in graphic design with minors in drawing and computer imaging.
“I loved being able to learn and experiment with different design disciplines,” Jacinda says. “What stuck for me was being able to learn about graphic design and see that I could do all of those in this one discipline.”
Jacinda went on to develop and enhance her professional skills in several design positions until she landed a job as the designer for the Cleveland Municipal School District. She worked there for seven years before moving on to serve as the in-house graphic designer for the Cleveland Division of Water, where she ended up working for the Department of Public Utilities and the Mayor of Cleveland’s offices, too.
Her desire to help young people discover design careers led her to do extensive volunteer work to train students for summer jobs in her department. While doing so, she met people who convinced her to pursue graduate school at The Ohio State University. A full-ride scholarship enabled Jacinda to quit her job at the Water Department and spend three years studying and analyzing the lack of diversity in design disciplines while earning her M.F.A. in design research and development and a minor in nonprofits studies from The Ohio State University in 2016.
In 2017, that work led her to launch designExplorr, a social impact organization whose mission addresses the diversity gap within the design profession by exposing design to African American and Latino youth and raising awareness for corporate organizations. She has led design thinking, DEI and community design workshops for numerous organizations including Amazon, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and AIGA chapters. In 2022, Ringling College of Art + Design awarded her an honorary doctorate for her contributions to the profession.
“If we could bottle what Jacinda does at designExplorr and deliver it to cities, schools, neighborhoods, and families around the country it would radically change the future, because they would find the agency to imagine and deliver on their dreams.” says Julie Anixter, enterprise design principal, Throughline in Washington, D.C., and past executive director AIGA, the professional association of design. “Jacinda and designExplorr are role models for what’s missing and what’s possible in our approach to inspiring and empowering the next generation.”
In 2023, after several years of working in different locations, Jacinda opened designExplorr’s custom-designed, educational and professional resource-rich Experiential Learning Center in MidTown. (For more detailed information, visit designexplorr.com.)
“I’m fortunate enough to have designed a space where I can be creative and share it with so many African American and Latinx designers,” Jacinda says. “Every day I get to meet and mentor young people who are just as passionate as I am about this thing called design, and helping them to be successful on their design career journeys is the best part.”