Design Bay Area: The Future Started Here

We are the Bay Area’s first and leading multi-disciplinary design, arts, and culture platform, uniting creativity across every discipline to showcase the region’s influence and build the community that keeps it at the forefront.

We connect designers, creative leaders, and design-curious minds across every discipline to celebrate the work and advance design excellence.

We do this by creating opportunities for practitioners, brands, and organizations to collaborate and thrive, we position the San Francisco Bay Area as a global leader in innovation, technology, sustainability, and community impact.

We bring together the designers, makers, and artists who define the Bay Area’s creative spirit. Our mission is to showcase this region’s culture-forward design, ignite opportunity for our creative community, and amplify the Bay Area’s leadership in innovation, sustainability, and human-centered impact.

Through events such as San Francisco Design Week and our regional festivals, storytelling, and community-driven platforms, we help ideas flourish and ensure our region’s creativity reaches far beyond its borders.

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Leadership: Board of Directors

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Our History

Design Bay Area was founded in 2018 by Clement Mok, Dawn Zidonis, Alana Washington, and August de los Reyes. In 2021, we acquired San Francisco Design Week from AIGA SF founded in 2006—produced by Dawn since 2011—and helped grow it from a grassroots gathering into an international design destination. Today, Design Bay Area connects designers across all nine Bay Area counties through regional festivals such as Design Healdsburg, Design Palo Alto, Design Silicon Valley, Design Sausalito and Design Marin, programs, and platforms that create visibility, resources, and economic opportunity at both local and global scales.

San Francisco Design Week is funded by a gracious financial gift from the Estate of August de los Reyes.

Our visual identity was designed by Mucho. Channeling the optimism, warmth and openness of the Bay Area with the flat, vertical side representing the Pacific and each ray pointing to the 9 unique counties which make up the Bay Area. The brand was developed around the concept of ‘West Coast Energy’ the new symbol is reminiscent of a spark, or sun, shining back from the Coast. The symbol also creates a large letter ‘D’ for Design. The color palette represents the ‘Golden Hour’ — a unique light that hits the Bay Area and California at the end of each day as the sun sets in the West, featuring ‘International Orange’ — the color of the Golden Gate Bridge. The typography is also unique to the region, designed by Lucas Sharp of Sharp Type based in the Bay Area.

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Design Ambassadors

Our Design Ambassadors are selected as leaders to represent our communities diverse set of disciplines and also distinct regions to represent the nine counties of the SF Bay Area. They act as ambassadors, advisors and representatives for the Design Bay Area organization.

Event Support Team

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Our Partners in Design

Celebrating 20 years means celebrating the community that has helped build, support, and sustain our mission every step of the way. This includes you! We especially want to share our gratitude for the late August de los Reyes, our Design Ambassadors, and the support of our partners MuchoSF, Manual, Pact Studio, Hybrid-Design, Adobe, IRG Stone, Flowers Winery, Anthropic, Rivian, Whipsaw, Faulkner Architects, Podesta Construction, Stoev Design Group, Ciel Creative Space, FourOneNine, Tiya, GaeaStar, Retronyms, Bay Area Made, Chef Tu, Golden Rule Cocktails, Fort Point Beer, and Robert Half.

Our partners below have consistently helped build, support, and sustain our mission every step of the way through their genorosity.

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In Memoriam