An Existential Krossing

What counts as identity on stolen land? What counts as identity as the progeny of a stolen people? What counts as identity when practicing a curated religion from the very people who enslaved our ancestors? What counts as identity when you witness the national anthem being sung by those seeking to arrest your progress? What counts as identity while participating in a political system that preys and profits on the marginalization of its citizens? Thanksgiving and the Trail of Tears, former Three-Fifths, blue-eyed Jesus, and “America the Beautiful”—all stand as markers of an educational indoctrination in Southern public schools and the social contracts of organized faith. What counts as identity as the grandson and son of Southern U.S. college graduates? What counts as identity as a Black college graduate? All are part of a system—all are part of someone else’s design that enlisted my parents, grandparents, and community as their agents, involuntarily.

Such paradoxes deeply confounded me growing up as the son of a music professor/ordained minister and a licensed clinical dietitian. Rights versus wrongs. The well-heeled standing order of binaries in Southern culture in race, class, and gender. The public codeswitch and my private exhale—I was sheltered. How sheltered is debatable, but I wasn’t exposed to secular music beyond the kid-safe pop and R&B of my dad’s album collection until I was eleven years old. Over a decade of life listening to nothing but gospel, Negro spirituals, classical music, and Contemporary Christian when friends in my fifth-grade class were singing the hook to “Jump” by Kriss Kross. At that moment, I became uniquely aware of my identity.

Kriss Kross was a hip-hop duo of boys, Chris Kelly and Chris Smith—only a couple years older than I was—whose first album launched in 1992. The pair was far from the socially acceptable young man that my parents planned for me to become. Where did this type of music come from? What community did Kriss Kross exist in? Who gave them permission to wear sports uniforms as regular clothes, and backwards, no less? They definitely wouldn’t have been made to go to church, I thought. Far from PBS children’s programming and documentary history, they were from another planet. They were cool, and I was—for the first time—on the outside of a shared social knowledge.

But the music of my juvenile social circle was just the lure, the beginning of questioning and taking inventory of the bouquet of my so-called identity. Until this point, I’d viewed myself through the lens of Popular Science, Sports Illustrated Kids, Life, Black college homecomings, and a close-knit group of professional Black artists in the community. These Kriss Kross kids—and anyone like them—were nowhere to be found in these publications and experiences. The fringe, existing in a sort of margin of pop culture, became my new home. I was scrambling to find their music—sneaking off to listen to the local hip-hop and R&B radio stations—and desperate to find images of them and learn their song lyrics so I could be part of the dialogue of my preteen social circle, to be part of the culture that I visually identified with: Black, male, and straddling conformities.

Why am I sharing this personal tale?! My life as a graphic designer has followed this very same, wobbly path. You mean to tell me that someone got paid to create that ad, lay out that book, or design that poster? A person actually hand-drew the letters that we use to type and text on our devices? Even now, I still feel young in the game. Learning the deep narratives of design methodologies, their origins, and their evangelists has continued an arc of discovery that has been boundless.

The first Black designer I saw in a publication was Bobby C. Martin Jr. in Print magazine’s 2008 Annual Design Review, published just after I’d begun graduate school at the University of Memphis. Soon afterward, I read an article about Joshua Darden, a Black designer living in New York, who launched his eponymous type foundry, Darden Studio, in 2004. A loose illustration of his face on the foundry’s website served as the only reference that hinted at his Blackness. It wasn’t until 2021 that I’d even heard the name Matthew Carter, when a former colleague heard I’d been admitted to Yale’s MFA program in graphic design and asked if he was still teaching. Equally fascinating was being reintroduced to some of my earliest influences as graphic designers and typographers: Aaron Douglas of Harlem Renaissance fame; AfriCOBRA—the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists—a central part of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago; and Emory Douglas of the Black Panther Party. AfriCOBRA infused typography into their works to bridge the conceptual gaps of visual abstraction that may confound their audiences, while Aaron and Emory Douglas enhanced their publications by combining hand-drawn lettering with conventional typesetting.

I began hand-lettering in 2020 as a creative outlet and began type design in 2021 as a form-making and visual voice exercise. Since then, I’ve further explored and recognized the marriage of concept and production method as an opportunity to expand the array of design application and dispatch. I recently met the legendary Ed Fella, and in the deep discussion that followed our introduction, he reinforced two important concepts: one is never too late, and there is always room to develop as a graphic designer. He told me a humorous story about sharing the stage with the famed designer Massimo Vignelli. An audience member asked what motivated each of them at the later stage of their careers. Vignelli responded that he was motivated by the late Mies van der Rohe. When it was Fella’s turn, he said, “Me, I’m inspired by me!”

My expressions are curated by what I have learned and seek to learn. My identity? It is still evolving.