The Black Experience in Design

Identity, Expression & Reflection
Anne Berry, et al. 2022

I would like to retire the Paul Rand look. I would like to retire mid-century Helvetica. I want to retire flush left. I want to retire white space. It is the look of my oppressor … a mid-century era when it wasn’t easy to enter the New York marketplace as a Black designer. When I see that look, the only thing it says to me is, “You cannot enter. You don’t belong. You’re not good enough.”

Cheryl D Miller, in Berry et al, 2022

This amazingly powerful quote by graphic designer Cheryl D Miller is used in Ruha Benjamin’s foreword in The Black Experience in Design. It talks about the idea that meaning in design, and in this example typography, depends on who you are, where you are from, your upbringing and social status. This is a really interesting interrogation of the so-called universal language of modernism and what we, in the West, might think of as a progressive, liberal, democratic design language.

This really changed my understanding of modernist typography and has helped me to think about and develop my ARP intervention and approach to teaching more generally. Specifically, thinking about how students should be encouraged to develop their own typographic language, and to consider people from alternative cultures, communities and how these audiences might interpret the visual characteristics of typefaces in different ways.

In the foreword, the author talks about how the experiences of Black designers offer us “invaluable insights into the possibilities for understanding our collective experiences. These stories also inform action, specifically about how design will be taught, researched, practised, curated, critiqued and created in the future.” (Berry, et al, 2022, p.11).

This quote sets the scene for what I would like my intervention to achieve. To encourage students to explore their experiences and identities to create new design languages that open up possibilities for how we might see the discipline of typography and Graphic Design.

After following a link to the full conversation between Cheryl D Miller and Eugene Korsunskiy on www.medium.com, I read more about Miller’s thoughts on this subject.

The quote originally came from a webinar organized by Chris Rudd at the IIT Institute of Design (“The Future Must be Different from the Past: Embracing an Anti-Racist Agenda”). Miller was asked to reflect about the elements of contemporary graphic design that she believes symbolise racism and oppression and the above quote followed.

The author of the conversation, Eugene Korsunskiy, shares similar concerns to me, as a white educator, who often presents minimalism, order, grids, white space as ‘good’ design. He lists four takeaways from his conversation with Miller:

I have to saturate my visual experience with diverse images

I have to learn and teach the history — the whole history

I have to lean on my students as collaborators in this journey

This last point really stood out to me and connected to my plans for my intervention and how I work with the students.

“An important truth that I already know is: my students are not there to be passive recipients of my wisdom and knowledge. I have to make them real collaborators in this effort — I have to make them learn with me, and make them help me (and each other) see better.” (Korsunskiy, 2020)

This really ties in to my research project, so that rather than me thinking it I my responsibility to learn everything and show my students everything I know. We can explore together, as they bring so much more than me to the table, in terms of knowledge, experiences, skills, from all over the world, that represent different cultures and identities.

In the conversation, Cheryl D. Miller suggests this as a teaching exercise:

“Take a brand — say, McDonald’s, or Coca-Cola, or Disney — and study what it looks like in four different points on the globe. Look at Coke packaging in Brazil, and in Asia, and in North America, and in Paris. And let’s talk about what we see.”

“I even suggest going to the corner grocery and convenience stores in Black, Latinx or Asian neighborhoods and look at the food packaging. […] food packaging can reveal a lot about design ethnicities.”

“You’ll start to decolonize your students’ point of view — and your own — if you have them do this kind of documentation. Look, you don’t have the answers yourself. So, get them busy!” (Miller, in Korsunskiy, 2020)

“I can give my students an opportunity to practice speaking multiple design languages, and develop a felt sense of how identity can shape design — and an understanding that many different identities can shape many different (equally valid) design expressions.” (Korsunskiy, 2020)

This idea of getting students to practice speaking multiple design languages and how identity can shape design and the validity of this is really connected to my thinking of my ARP intervention, this is what I want to do with the typeface design project.

Bibliography

Berry, A.H. et al. (Eds) (2022) The Black Experience in Design : Identity, Expression and Reflection, , Skyhorse Publishing Company, Incorporated. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=6866123.

Korsunskiy, E. (2020) ‘Dismantling White Supremacy in Design Classrooms: My Conversation With Design Guru Cheryl D. Miller’, Future of Design in Higher Education. Accessed 20 December 2024 (https://medium.com/fdhe/dismantling-white-supremacy-in-design-classrooms-my-conversation-with-design-guru-cheryl-d-miller-5dc9c48b15e4_