Designing With Purpose: Sydnea Lewis on Sustainability, Clarity, and Creative Life Beyond the Hustle

By Chad Eric Smith, Director of Marketing and Communications, Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts

Featured Image: CABCoFA Senior Lecturer Sydnea Lewis 

For Sydnea Lewis, design has never been just about aesthetics. It’s about clarity, connection, and building a creative life that lasts.

A senior lecturer in the Art Department at Howard University’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, Lewis teaches graphic design, digital design, and entrepreneurship, grounding her courses in real-world practice and lived experience. A Howard alum herself, she brings more than a decade of professional work, international training, and business ownership into the classroom, offering students not just technical skills, but a clear roadmap for navigating the realities of creative careers.

That philosophy extends beyond campus through her long-standing relationship with AIGA DC, one of the largest chapters of the nation’s oldest professional association for design. With chapters across the country and a robust community of working designers in the region, AIGA DC provides Howard students with access to industry conversations, networking opportunities, and hands-on experiences that bridge classroom learning and professional practice. Lewis, a member for the past two years, has supported the organization through lectures, portfolio reviews, mentoring, and student engagement, while also working toward a deeper, more formal partnership, including the possibility of a future student chapter at Howard.

“Design can’t exist in a vacuum,” said Kara Mask, Education Chair of AIGA DC. “In the post-pandemic era, much of the creative industry has lost sight of this reality, something AIGA DC has been actively working to address. We’ve found a passionate partner in Senior Lecturer Sydnea Lewis. Sydnea has generously volunteered her time to share her expertise on both local and national stages, speaking candidly about burnout, resilience, and the evolving realities facing creatives today. She has also been instrumental in connecting students from the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts to portfolio reviews, professional development opportunities, and shared spaces with global brands such as Arc’teryx and The Atlantic, among others through AIGA. With her leadership, AIGA DC hopes to elevate its impact and strengthen its connection to Howard University and DC’s talented young creatives.”

That work exists within a broader design ecosystem at Howard shaped by nationally recognized leaders such as Cheryl D. Miller, AIGA Medalist, Cooper Hewitt National Design Awardee, and one of the most influential voices in the history of American graphic design. A civil rights activist, scholar, and revisionist historian, Miller’s career has been defined by expanding access, challenging the marginalization of Black designers, and reshaping how the discipline understands its own history. Her presence at Howard situates design education within a lineage that centers equity, rigor, and cultural accountability, values that continue to inform how faculty engage students in both theory and practice.

 

Within that context, Lewis’s work brings those values directly into the classroom, translating history, ethics, and advocacy into practical tools students can carry into their professional lives.

At its core, it’s about connection. Being in community with other designers, learning what’s happening in the industry, and giving students access to spaces they might not otherwise see.

That emphasis on access and exposure reflects her broader teaching approach. Lewis is known for an unusually transparent classroom model, one that invites students into the realities of her own creative business, Creative Obsessions, which she founded while still in school and has grown over the past 14 years. Students observe client interactions, review proposals and contracts, and gain insight into the decision-making that shapes real projects, all under professional confidentiality agreements.

“It’s important for them to see that this isn’t theoretical,” Lewis explains. “This is real life. They see the wins, the setbacks, and the work it takes to sustain a creative practice.”

Lewis’s own professional path includes international study at the Florence Design Academy in Italy, an experience she credits less with technical instruction and more with expanding her perspective. Immersed in global design cultures, she gained a deeper understanding of how context, culture, and storytelling shape creative work, while also recognizing how well her Howard education prepared her to navigate those spaces with confidence.

At the heart of her teaching is a message that resonates deeply with today’s students: anti-hustle, anti-burnout, and sustainability.

I’m very intentional about teaching students how to build creative lives without constant stress. It’s not just about being good designers. It’s about what happens when things get hard, when the money’s not there, or when you’re questioning what you’re going to do. How do you keep going without losing yourself?

That same clarity underpins her perspective on branding, which she approaches less as visual packaging and more as purposeful storytelling rooted in audience, intention, and impact. While many clients initially come to her for websites or visual assets, Lewis reframes the work around deeper questions of identity and connection.

“If you don’t understand why you do what you do, or who you’re really trying to reach, no amount of visuals will fix that,” she says. “Branding isn’t about what you like. It’s about how people feel and what they gain from working with you.”

It’s a lesson with relevance far beyond individual businesses, extending to institutions, organizations, and even colleges themselves. Brand clarity, Lewis emphasizes, requires intention, alignment, and a clear understanding of purpose, not just polished design.

Through her teaching, partnerships, and professional practice, Sydnea Lewis exemplifies a model of creative leadership rooted in honesty, sustainability, and care. For Howard students, that model offers something increasingly rare: a vision of success that is not only ambitious, but humane.