Black and Free

Weave the joyful textures of Black freedom 

A brand for a better world already in reach, where Blackness and freedom are synonymous

In any struggle for liberation, joy can be the hardest thing to keep hold of. As the world pushes and grinds against you, tripping you up and pushing you back with every minor hint of progress in the struggle, you can sometimes forget what you’re fighting for.  Black and Free is a celebration of Black excellence that offers a view of liberation that can’t forget these things, because it’s founded in that very freedom and joy. Naila-Keleta Mae, Black and Free’s primary champion and principal investigator, is a marvellous, radical force of creative nature. As well as an academic, Naila is a poet, writer, singer songwriter and performer. She knows the power of language, and how it can limit perspective, but also open up possibilities. With a 5-year research grant to bring together a robust consortium of academics, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as private and public organizations, the project explores the lives and expression of Black people through creative cultural lenses like visual art, music, dance, poetry and sports. “Black and Free is about what we can learn by paying close attention to Black expressive culture, everything from visual art, to dance, film, theatre, blog posts and sports,” as she puts it. “What if we could imagine a reality without white supremacy, one where Black people are free?” Naila asked Otherness for a brand strategy that would spring authentically from this place of joy, and in particular the vibrant aesthetics of Afropunk. Resisting the standard tropes of Canadian institutional minimalism, while being robust enough to work with and resonate with major cultural and academic institutions, it would need to be a brand that would start from a place other than the visual language of protest they had become used to.

Bespoke typography, Kente style

Otherness knew from the outset that the heart of the identity should come from a Black perspective. It also needed to be rooted in the power of language, to express Black freedom, and to express joy. Given Naila’s own background, a brand anchored in written language was the self-evident way forward. All of these factors led us to typography as the fluid heart of the brand. As an added bonus, typographically driven brands can be much simpler to implement for end users without strong design experience, students and interns with limited experience, using limited software. We engaged Tafui Maclean, a Jamaican-born, Montreal-based artist and designer, to create the brand’s signature bespoke font, which will be released into the Creative Commons during the lifetime of the project.Tafui brought the full force of her experience, bridging textile and product design with creative and visual arts, in a design that deeply explores symbolism and metaphor through the language and geometry of woven Black art. The resulting typeface is inspired, amongst other things, by the signature blockiness of Ghanaian Kente cloth.

A vivacious but practical brand toolkit

The Black and Free brand needed to speak boldly, but operate practically. Tafui’s typeface focuses on stretching and scaling–not accidentally, it’s perfect for taking up space. We chose to bring back the original textural inspirations that inspired it as the code visual motif. In this, the typeface itself becomes a textural experience, woven with and supported by a series of unmistakable, unmissable patterns, and audacious, futuristic colourways.  Simple combinations of texture, colour, and type present a consistent and coherent brand experience across widely varying outputs including social media, exhibitions, posters, public events, and publications.