1. Context & Background
Inverted Blackness began as a gallery walk exploring Black identity through a radical, almost subversive lens. The premise was built on photo negatives, visual inversions, and the emotional contradictions that come with existing as a Black person in a world conditioned to misperceive Blackness. The founder had a photo documentary capturing personal stories, each layered with nuance: loneliness seen as clarity, or as homesickness. It was an arresting project.
When I came onboard, the task wasn’t simply to design a logo. It was to create something that could hold these multitudes—a mark that wouldn’t flatten the stories but would invite deeper inspection. My design process followed a familiar arc: Background → Narrative → Design. But the outcome was anything but typical.
2. Narrative & Conceptual Direction
From early conversations, it became clear that "Inverted Blackness" wasn’t just about flipping colors. It was about flipping assumptions. To invert Blackness was to:
What emerged was the central theme of Unframed Stories. To be unframed is to break the boundaries of what has been historically defined. It is to color outside the lines, to shift perspective, to ask not just what is in the frame but what the frame itself says about power, perception, and identity.
