FOUNDER/GRAPHIC DESIGNER AFRICAN AMERICAN GRAPHIC DESIGNERS (AAGD), AUSTIN TX
I have always been a curious kid from New Orleans looking to connect with more creatives like me. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I made a point to rebuild the dispersed creative community.
I connected with national design superstars through social media. When we met at the Hue Design conference in 2018, we decided to work together to advance our work and focus our energy on moving the industry forward for marginalized designers and clients.
Our crew started with educators, artists, and producers. My main man is Dave McClinton. He is a nationally collected artist, and our forever memorialized core team included Jordon Moses, Russell Toynes, Nakita Pope, and Terresa Moses.
We worked together and nurtured a community of Black designers where legends like Cheryl Miller, Juan Roberts, Ron Tinsely, Richard Manigault, Monna Morton, Craig Brimm, Derek Walker, and Alan Bell made themselves available to guide us along the paths of being polished creatives. They also warned us of the perils ahead as we learn how to balance money and community.
Through our collective efforts, we’ve hired several designers in our community, like Derrick Whitfield, Denishia Macon, Jakia Fuller, and Gabi Zuniga. And we have invested over a million dollars back into designers who are passionate about their careers.
Tell us how and why you became involved in socially responsible communications, any thoughts on why design can be an especially effective tool for this goal, and, if you wish, give us an example of a project of which you are proud.
“Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.” — W.E.B. DuBois “The Crisis” of October 1926 “Criteria of Negro Art”
As a young adult, I was fortunate enough to study my history at the Amistad Center in New Orleans. I found sayings like the above W.E.B. DuBois quote to be riveting and vital to the progression of Black identity. The time for cultural design and cultural engineering is now. It might be the only thing that saves us.
We are all now cognizant of the intricately designed systems of oppression and the carelessness of an American society that cannot grasp climate change, school shootings, racism, and the inequalities of capitalism. Using our creativity to solve these issues will be far more beneficial to our future than continuing to create products for consumerism.
Given the confluence of events and challenges our society now faces, does this moment in time present any special opportunities, urgencies, obstacles to designing for good?
Our work has had a transformative impact on sensitive subjects and overlooked communities. When we worked with the Death Penalty Information Center, we made starkly serious subjects elegant and illustrative as opposed to using tropes associated with the spectacle of Black Death. When we work with Alex Wright of Learn Level, we collage letters from incarcerated people into visual messages that convey their humanity and willingness to work their way back into society. While working with Omari Sousa and the State of Black Design, we’re assisting with messaging, visual communication, and building mechanisms to unite our community. When we worked with our partners, Rising Communities, in South LA, we flew down to the opening of a community program and art show we created to ensure they connected with their art community respectfully and openly.
