An Essay on Black Identity in Graphic Design
This independent study began with a quest to bridge this gap of knowledge or availability in the curriculum surrounding black aesthetics in graphic design. There are mentions of black designers and the work they have done that have been sprinkled around my education, but there was never really any thread that I could hold onto, or definitive aesthetic that I could point to and say, “that is made by a black designer, for sure.” I think I was looking for something in that vein to be able to cling onto in my ever-lasting search of identity I have within myself that influenced my creative process in photography. The exception to that is graphic design artifacts that were made for the purpose of black emancipatory movements. Those artifacts hold an undeniably black aesthetic to them, and although this part of history is incredibly important, the constant reminder of your emancipation is also a constant reminder that you were also once chained. What I mean by this is these artifacts are a reminder of the road that has been traveled to make my own and other North-American BIPOC people alike’s existence in the field possible. Though, if that is the only signifier of a black aesthetic have we not gone forward? Have we not pushed our style’s boundary further? With all these questions, I also started questioning the presence of black designers in the field. Do we belong? There must be more, and we must be there, right? This research has lead me to the understanding that due to the nature of graphic design practice, and the systemic struggles that designer’s who identify as black go through, searching for a black aesthetic is graphic design is futile. We should instead focus on rejecting biases brought to us by historical built system and create a new identity black presence in the field of graphic design is the most important.
I always felt a little bit guilty for trying to vary my resources and look away from symbols of freedom that were made during civil rights movement and for a broader definition, but a definition nonetheless, of black aesthetics. I tried to answer this question with the goal of being able to find a definition or a thread to follow to eventually be able to build an archive or find ways to make the work more readily available. This availability would make it easier to be referenced by anyone who want to, or relate to the designer and culture.
I think that before resolving the search for a black aesthetic, it is important to understand graphic design as a practice and it’s biases. Graphic design was created and has evolved within a white European context, and has always reflected and disseminated its voice. It is no surprise, then, that when looking at works of graphic design made to emulate different cultures that fall out of the scope of white-European culture, they come across as reductive and racist. For example, typefaces like Papyrus, Chinese and Africa, and everything that has used them as an element in their design seems completely ridiculous when you look at them with a critical eye. This is unsurprising because in a sense, they took a European method of approaching the translation of culture and applied it to non-European culture. This method reduces other cultures and amplifies colonial European superiority. Graphic design has also always served the needs of capitalism and bourgeois culture. In the text “Sh*t Design” by Dr. Keith Robertson, he critiques graphic design education the code graphic design abides by. The graphic design “code” dictates if something is defined as “good” graphic design or “bad” graphic design, and argues against the exclusion of “bad” design in design education. To make his point, the author compares “That’s Life!” magazine to Vogue. Vogue projects the voice of bourgeois culture by using the graphic design code and building identity on the style of material possession. On the other hand, “That’s Life” pays no attention to this code, and abides by popular culture’s vernacular. It also makes its content relatable to the lived experience of the masses.
This phenomenon is encapsulated by this quote from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He says, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” Your taste is dictated by your place in society, and your place in society dictates what you consume.
Going back to black emancipatory artifacts, they hold such great importance because they were able to figuratively snatch the voice away from dominating culture, and help guide oppressed people towards immense social change. This movement led to great change, and this is why they are highlighted so greatly in design education. The semiotic weight of these artifacts are immense and are still relevant to this day.
Although the condition of people that are oppressed because of the colour of their skin is significantly better today than it was during the inception of these symbols, there is still a lot of dismantling left before a true end of oppression is reached. Though this investigation has given me a greater appreciation for these artifacts, the question of belonging in the field and contemporary black aesthetic in graphic design still remained.
While reading “Here: Where the Black Designers Are” by Dr. Cheryl D. Miller, I was able to confirm that yes, black designers have been in the field of graphic design for a long time. In the book, she describes the struggles that black designers face through stories
that she has uncovered through research, conversations she has had, and what she has personally gone through.She talks about instances where Black designers are shocked that they cannot get a job in graphic design with their degrees in fine art, and this shows a clear disconnect between the information they are given before they undertake studies and the realities of the graphic design field.** She also tells the story of a black illustrator that was terrified of meeting clients in the late 60’s because of the fear of losing clients or having his wage be reduced when the client learns that he is black. Ultimately, the anxiety of this was too much for him and he killed himself. His name was Mozelle Thompson.*
This tragic story is important to tell because it shows the impact that discrimination can have on BIPOC people in their fields of work. This story also started my train of thought on the erasure of black style signifiers because of discrimination in design work. Was this the reason that a black aesthetic was so hard to pinpoint in graphic design?
I wanted more answers, and through the book’s references, I was drawn to read Dr. Miller’s 1985 Master’s thesis paper, titled “Transcending The Problems Of The Black Graphic Designer To Success In The Marketplace.” In her paper, she offers multi-level solutions to combat the lack of presence in the field. She makes powerful arguments that dictate the importance of parental support in both the financial and moral acceptance of their child’s choice of pursuing a career in graphic design. In the 4th chapter of her paper, she offers propositions for change to promote greater opportunities for “blacks” to assure greater chances of success in the field.*
So much of what she is proposing is something that is reverberated in the texts I read in “The Black Experience in Design,” This book is a series of interviews with black
designers of today. They are interviewed because of their expertise, their experiences and their ability to critique the field of graphic design. The parallels between the two show how the problems that were brought up by Dr. Miller’s 1989 Thesis project, are still extremely prominent to this day. Change at a systemic level is a slow and arduous process that takes the effort of many for incremental gain. As an example of this, Vann Graves recalls,
My parents were active in the civil rights movement. One of their first acts as a couple was to protest at the "white only" counter of Thalhimers department store in downtown Richmond, Virginia. They were fighting for the right to exist—to have full rights as United States citizens.
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My parents didn't realize that they also fought for me to imagine greater possibilities. At Howard University, I pursued the best of both worlds: a business degree in marketing pieced together with graphic design. When I told them I wanted to study fine arts and graphic design, they could not fathom that such a course would lead to great things. I may as well have told them I wanted to study witchcraft.
This serves as an example of what a black designer must do when having a conversation with their parents about their choice of pursuing a career in a creative field. Vann Graves’ getting a double major for a his bachelor’s degree mixing business and advertisement was likely a compromise to get parental approval and support. This directly relates to Dr. Miller’s thesis regarding the parental approval having a great impact on the outcome of black designer’s career. He was able to have a conversation
with his parents and be supported in pursuing a successful creative career that he explains was completely outside of the scope of reference for his parents.
Now that we have given some context to the experience of the black designer and their condition in the field they create in, I would like to finally answer the question of defining a black aesthetic. In “Searching for a Black Aesthetic in American Graphic Design,” Sylvia Harris writes,
The graphic design profession is driven by visual innovation. The most visible and celebrated designers are those who are continuously innovating within, or in opposition to, the prevailing schools of design thought.
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Is there a potential design tradition that can fuel Black designers in the same way that Black music traditions fuel Black musicians? By "Black tradition" I do not mean Black subject matter or imagery, but the styling and expressions common to people of African descent. I believe this tradition does exist, but Black contributions to America's rich graphic design history have been overlooked, so far, by design historians who have focused either on European influences or on the current phenomenon of cultural hybridity.
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In discussion with design educators (both Black and white), many argue that to focus too much attention on Black aesthetics will limit the full creative expression of Black designers. They argue that Black designers have spent the last twenty years working to erase race and class bias in the profession; to them a focus on Blackness invites discrimination. I disagree. Black designers
have access, training, and opportunity; what they lack is the drive that comes from innovation. And in order to thrive, innovation requires a tradition to either build on or oppose.
Harris talks about the erasure of blackness in design to avoid discrimination, while also stating that discrimination even with the erasure of black signifiers has caused the overlooking of design artifacts made by black designers. She argues that the current mission towards inclusion and homogeneity are steps in the wrong direction. She instead thinks we must search for artifacts that have been made by black designers so that black designers may be able to innovate from them.
I agree with this practice of searching for black-made design so that a new wave of innovation may be possible building off of it. An example of this practice is Tré seals. He is a designer and type founder that makes typefaces from black emancipatory movements. He used “I’M A MAN” posters made for and during the 1968 sanitation workers protest in Memphis.* He used design principles to create a complete and coherent alphabet based on the letters that were used in these posters. This is direct example of using historical artifacts as a basis for contemporary innovation.
Simultaneously, there is a genuine claim to reject historical artifacts in favour of using a broader range of references to create a new voice, aesthetic, style and practice. I first came across this idea when reading the text Post Black, Old Black by Paul C. Taylor. Taylor states,
Similarly, the idea that more people are rejecting the traditional tropes of blackness is less telling than it may seem at first. There are empirical questions here that I am in no position to settle, so let me stipulate to the most favorable case: I assume that more black people are in fact more comfortable doing things that do not seem traditionally "black" than ever before. (Whatever that would be-hiking, speed skating, wearing Birkenstocks, playing golf: whatever.) Even so, vanishingly few of these people seem to approach this nontraditionality as a repudiation of blackness.
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Race theorists thought of themselves as uncovering the causes of human biological variation and social stratification. And white supremacy's race workers-the architects, managers, and inhabitants of the institutions of white supremacy-took themselves to be establishing a kind of justice, if we understand justice in terms of the old idea of giving people their due. (White people, "we" thought, were better than others, and therefore deserved better treatment. Nonwhites, meanwhile, needed guidance, or discipline, or whatever, and deserved none of the privileges of higher beings.) However, now that classical racialism has given way to critical race theory, race thinking has been stripped of these illusory goals. Just as painters came to realize that their history was not really about getting better at fooling the eye, race theorists came to realize that their history was not really about explaining the general phenomena of human diversity and social stratification. They saw that it had, in point of fact, been about overruling, appropriating, and distorting
other mechanisms for producing diversity and stratification to create new forms of difference and inequality and about hiding its work by pretending that the social arrangements it helped create were part of the natural order.
He also states,
Some argue that race-thinking is obsolete and indefensible, and should give way to some variety of nonracial humanism, universalism, or cosmopolitanism. Others argue that race is a storehouse of social meaning that we can appropriate and play with as we see fit. And others argue that race-thinking remains a useful tool for navigating and understanding the world that previous race-thinking has made.The fact that reasonable people can see race as an atavism, a plaything, or a tool already itself suggests that
race-thinking has entered a post-historical phase, a point at which the future of the practice is not assured or clear. In addition, the views themselves present distinct post-historical visions. On the first two approaches, race takes the place of art on Hegel's scheme: having lost its historical mission, it is free to do or be anything, or nothing, without historical consequence. On the last approach, though, race is in the position of Geist. Race theory has come to know itself, and to know its subject of study-racial diversity and stratification the material consequence of its own activity. This means that racial history is over, that the cognitive circuit has been closed.
What Dr. Taylor brings up is important because he denotes the fact that blackness is transmuting while historical black references are stunting this transformation. He
argues there can come a time where history comes to the disservice of a people, and rejecting it in that moment leaves way for a new story to begin. In this case, we can truly argue that black history in design is a reminder that our place has always been outside of it. We had to fight for our symbols of black emancipation. We have had to hide our identities to have fair wages if wages at all such as in the case of Mozelle Thompson. We have had to act better and overqualifiy ourselves to have presence in design like R. Vann Graves. By rejecting history, we are able to free ourselves from that association and make a new path in design.
Tré Seals, the type founder and designer that I referenced earlier doesn’t just stop at using black emancipatory references to apply his method of logical completion of unfinished typefaces. The typeface “Carrie” uses the same methodology that he used for the sanitation workers protest signage and applied it to the signage made for an October 23rd, 1915 women’s rights protest in New York to complete the typeface. By using the logic of the principles brought forth by Taylor, he does not need to categorize himself as a black designer and can freely create using his method using his history at his own discretion.
With these ideas brought forward by Harris and Taylor, I was able to make my own conclusion, which ultimately comes down to a changing of language and optics when regarding BIPOC experience in design. Trying to find a black aesthetic is incredibly reductive and is a disservice to black people that practice or are trying to join the practice of graphic design.
Through this new lens I would define Tré Seals as a designer that identifies as black, not a black designer. This difference in language is minute and can lead to confusion or even people to feel insulted but the difference is important to uphold as it removes the barriers of the assumptions on the practice and allows for exploration and innovation beyond a defined area of design. Their presence is what should be celebrated and what is immensely important.
In Mythologies by Roland Barthes, a text referenced by Dr. Robertson’s “Sh*t design,” Barthes states, “in a bourgeois culture, there is neither proletarian culture nor proletarian morality, there is no proletarian art; ideologically, all that is not bourgeois is obliged to borrow from the bourgeoisie.” This makes a point about how when freeing ourselves from the title of black designer and abandoning the quest for the search of a black aesthetic, and rather focusing on borrowing, transforming then disseminating the transformed product, then the practice of graphic design may be able to shift. This is greatly amplified when designers who identify as black are in positions where their voice is taking into consideration when making decisions regarding style.
Darhil Crooks experienced has first hand experience of what it means to make a difference in decision making. He recounts,
I won't say the name of the magazine in this example, there was a picture of a black male athlete posing on a pedestal flexing for a fashion shoot. The guy that I was working with says, "This is cool, right?" No, it's not cool. That's a terrible photo. Here's why. He looks like he is on display like a slave. Like he's
being idolized for his body and nothing else. And he's like, "Oh, I hadn't even thought about it that way." (75-76)
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It made a difference when I was working on the cover for The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates, at the Atlantic-and I'm not throwing darts at anybody—but the immediate thing was to say let's get a photo of a slave and put it on the cover. Absolutely not! We got to move past this imagery. It allowed us to consider a bigger, better way to tell this story. Just go big and go type and just hit people in the face with it! What would that story have been in somebody else's hands? I don't know the answer. But I do think part of that solution I came up with was because I am Black, my reaction was like, no! We get hit with those images so often in our lives. Every Black History Month, it's jarring and traumatic.
These two examples show the importance of the presence of designers who identify as black in the practice. Their presence is important to change visual vernacular and the progression of dissemination of imagery that take into account black voices.Through innovation of historical black references as well as the practice of design itself, we are able to make these incremental changes that help to redefine a collective identity rather than defining identity itself.
When I first came to this conclusion, I felt depressed. It is quite gloomy to come to the terms that there was nothing that I could define or put my finger and to attach myself to, but I then realized how freeing this was. This method frees you from the
constraints of style to ultimately feel more attached to your community and by association yourself. You don’t need to feel like you are more or less black because of the outcomes of your design practice, your presence alone in the field is important. Innovation that comes from designers who identify as black do not need to fit an aesthetic to be ground-breaking.
After examining the works of Harris, Taylor, Miller and others who in their experiences shared valuable information, it has led me to the conclusion that searching for a black aesthetic is quite reductive of in it’s way of putting identity within the confines of “something”. Instead the focus should be shifted on the presence of designer’s who identify as black so that their voices and innovation may have an impact in the direction of disseminated images and culture in the field of graphic design.
Bibliography
Taylor, Paul C. “Post-Black, Old Black.” African American Review, vol. 41, no. 4, 2007, pp. 625–40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25426981. Accessed 29
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Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paladin.
Berry, Anne, et al. The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection. Allworth Press, 2022.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. Harvard University.
Holmes-Miller, Cheryl D. Here Where the Black Designers Are. Princeton Architectural Press, 2024.
Miller, Cheryl D. “TRANSCENDING THE PROBLEMS OF THE BLACK GRAPHIC DESIGNER TO SUCCESS IN THE MARKETPLACE.” Pratt
University, 1985.
Robertson, Keith. SH*T Design: An Exploration of the Aesthetic in Graphic Design, School of Applied Communication, RMIT University, 2002.
Seals, Tre. “Carrie.” Vocal Type, Vocal Type, 5 June 2023, www.vocaltype.co/history-of/carrie.
Seals, Tre. “Martin.” Vocal Type, Vocal Type, 5 June 2023, www.vocaltype.co/history-of/martin.