Gabriel Lindsay

Naila Keleta-Mae

Tafui

University of Waterloo

In any struggle for liberation, self expression 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 offers a view of liberation that can’t forget these things, because it’s founded in that human right to expression. Naila Keleta-Mae, Black And Free’s founder 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 multiyear research grants that bring together a robust consortium of academics, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as private and public organizations, her project explores the Black people’s perspectives on freedom through creative cultural lenses like visual art, music, theatre, video, and academic publications. “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 from the tensions between the historical, the stereotypical, the futurist, and ideal futures of Black freedom, alongside 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. Working with Otherness, the brand was framed as a space between the historical visuals of protest, the Afropunk present, and the yet-unimagined futures her project would create. It would need to be a brand that didn’t address these starting places as paradoxes, but instead as motifs to knit together.

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 the potential of Black creativity across a range of perspetives. 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. 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.

Bespoke typography, Kente style

The Black And Free brand needed to speak boldly, but operate practically. Equipped with Tafui's typeface, Otherness extended the brand system around the theme of "taking up space", something that the typeface excelled at.

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.

Tafui's work in typeface design marks one of the few times (if not the first) in Canadian graphic design history where a typeface has been commissioned as art.