Last month was Black History Month -the first question that springs to mind is ‘Why just a month?’ shouldn’t Black History be as interwoven into our consciousness as people of colour are into our communities? That is a conversation that should be had in more influential places than this so I will move on.
In my role as Den Designer on CBBC’s The Dengineers I was given the task of creating a den that celebrated Black History for recipient Luke. In collaboration with Luke and his ideas, I thought that creating a bespoke wallpaper for the den would be a fitting tribute to all the wonderful characters throughout Black History. I knew immediately that I would like to do something unique with names and also had the idea to use hand illustrated portraits of some key players – immortalising those important faces on the walls of the den.
So the brief was;
Make the most of the names from a cross-section of Black History, to include lesser known ones (to encourage research) but also names specifically from British Black History.
Use the colours of the African Nations – Black, Red, Green and Gold.
Show some key faces through hand painted illustrations.
Inspire curiosity in Luke and make him feel proud to be a person of colour.
Early version of the design (pre spell check)
Throughout the design editing process it was decided that I should remove the faces from the wallpaper, I fought against this as I believed the design was beautiful. However, it was deemed that it was not obvious enough who the portraits were for the young TV audience. My argument was that surely that was the point of the den, to spark curiosity and promote education but ultimately I was overruled and we proceeded with the design minus the portraits.
Part of the fun of the design was to make the typography give a clue as to what the person named, had achieved. Which is why Muhammed Ali is written in a boxing type font and Mae Jemison looks like the NASA logo. We came up against a challenge here also as some logos cannot be reproduced legally, and as this was to be broadcast on the BBC we had to play it safe.
So little by little and what felt like hundreds of spell checks later we had a design that paid respect to the incredible characters that make up the Black History timeline. Luke had a world exclusive, one of a kind paper in his den and I hope that being surrounded by such names of greatness it inspires Luke do do great things and be fiercely proud of his heritage.
