Objective

Implement a strategic design plan to address the problem identified in Project Two. Effectively create a design program (visual identity system) by creating those elements most essential to your concept.

From Project Two I decided to move forward with my project for informing the viewer of the lack of black graphic designers in the US In the final critique, we talked about the need for the poster–as–quilt to communicate the feelings of the situation as well as the actual statistics. The main piece of data that I wanted to show was the population data of aiga versus that of the US Census Bureau.

2.6% of people in the United States are black, but only 3.2% of US graphic designers are black.

This stat guides the direction of my project, as its seen in a literal way, but also shown through metaphor and allusion. Also, I didn’t know how to sew.

notes

This quilt attempts to inform the viewer about the lack of black visibility in graphic design industry, academia, and history. 

It does so by utilizing the quilting styles and traditions of the Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The women are daughters and granddaughters former slaves, and have learned these styles through the women who came before them. These traditions are borrowed and merged with graphic design artifacts and tropes in order to tie the two legacies closer together.

The primary evidence for the lack of representation in the three segments of graphic design practice can be found by comparing the 2017 aiga Design Census with statistics fro the  u.s. Census Bureau. While 12.6% of the United States identifies as African–American, only 3.2% of graphic designers in the United States identify as such. This deficit is due to a number of issues that pervade out community, income inequality, lack of access to educational resources, lack of mentor–ship, etc. These issues are compounded when we look to how they effect the ability for graphic design to attract young black students of the practice. Additionally, these obstacles are cyclical, meaning that a lack of mentors in graphic design can only lead to a lesser number of mentors in the future.

To illustrate this deficit in the practice I created a simple pie chart in the form of a woodblock stamp. I then printed muslin, cut it down, and reassembled it by quilting the long strips together.

In the quilt, we see two styles of quilting that are borrowed from the women of the Gee’s Bend — geometric and found–fabric. Practices and elements of graphic design — the typographic grid, for instance — can be seen as relatives to the geometric tradition found down the center of the quilt. The found–fabric style ties the quilt back into me, the artist (note: artist, not designer), and my role in this scenario — a participant in both cultures.

The gridded stitching in the upper–left gives another more literal nod to graphic design, along with the iconography to the right. The lack of craftsmanship throughout the quilt not only speaks to my novice  approach to quiltmaking, but also the novice approach of the graphic design community in terms of ensuring equality and equity in our community by instituting the proper changes within ourself – industry, academia, and history. The unfinished character of the quilt nods to this business left unfinished by us.

The quilt is intended to be presented as a poster, a key artifact of graphic design. Furthermore, its size is relative to that of the weltformat poster, a traditional Swiss poster size.

The addition of the  black edging to the area that serves as a metaphor for graphic design exaggerates the practice’s need to first care for self–preservation at the cost of attracting new, diverse, and — in this case — black voices.