The Brooklyn Rail

Charlene Prempeh’s book, Now You See Me!: An Introduction to 100 Years of Black Design, presents the work of selected Black designers who worked across disciplines in the twentieth century. This collection of hero/ine stories about design and race describes how these professionals navigate racist obstacles while maintaining the highest levels of creativity and skill. The designers in this book are not a group of unicorns who were welcomed into overwhelmingly white creative fields; for most of them, wide recognition of their talents and contributions came belatedly or not at all.

The word “Black,” when used to describe the designers, includes people from the African diaspora working in Africa, the United States, and around the world. As a founder of the London-based creative agency A Vibe Called Tech, Prempeh is a Black British woman navigating a profession that has historically excluded people like her. “I’ve always had a huge interest in design and have loved writing about it as a journalist,” Prempeh explained over email. “But part of the process of creating the book was uncovering designers and moments that were new to me. The journey I hope the reader takes mirrors my own experience of research and discovery.” This conversationally readable and rigorously researched homage and history joins anthologies like The Black Experience in Design (2022)—to which I contributed an essay—and An Anthology of Blackness: The State of Black Design (2023). Unlike these books, which discuss how to diversify design practice or how design can play an essential role in achieving social justice, Now You See Me! reveals what it means, now and historically, to be a Black designer in a white-dominated profession.

The physical book, designed by Polymode, a self-described bi-coastal, queer, and minority-owned graphic design studio, visually demonstrates a commitment to bold design. Full-bleed color backgrounds, strategically placed bright and large breakout quotes, and lots of full-page images amplify graphic design’s power. It is broken into three sections, each devoted to a different sector of design: fashion, architecture, and graphic design. As Prempeh explained, “It was much more about using the designer’s experience and practice to highlight a theme or idea.” Design is one of the most visible and simultaneously ignored aspects of contemporary life. It influences people’s views of the world and attitudes more than they know, reflecting and influencing economic, social, and political environments. “It is important for [people] to understand [design] because they participate in it every day,” Prempeh noted via email. “Design is not something that’s separate from our experience of the world, and therefore, if we can understand and reduce discrimination and erasure in the space, it will hugely impact industries and individuals outside of design to insist on more equitable outcomes.” Books like Don Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things, revised and retitled in 2013 from the original 1988 version, point out how design influences behavior and quality of life. Prempeh’s book challenges readers to imagine design without racism and the potential that full inclusion could have on improving design (and life).

This book illustrates how Black design is usually viewed through the lens of white judgment and elevated by approval from inside the status quo, especially in the fashion industry. For example, clothing designer Ann Lowe’s decades of work have only recently been exhibited and properly acknowledged. “When I first started to read about Ann Lowe, it struck me that nearly every reference led with the fact that she designed Jackie Kennedy’s [wedding] dress,” Prempeh wrote. “To a large extent, the value of Lowe’s designs and career have been defined by the famous white lady she dressed, and this fact, when taken as the headline of her life, reduces her to a supporting character in another person’s legacy.” Prempeh devotes an entire page to reproducing a letter from Lowe to Mrs. Kennedy, then the Senator’s wife, regarding her hurt and disappointment that she was referred to as a “colored woman dressmaker, not the haute couture” in a 1961 Ladies Home Journal article. Including the typewritten letter shows how Lowe asserted herself as a well-known and coveted designer for Black and white society women and was clearly shocked that Kennedy did not see her that way. It may seem that in her time Lowe was naïve to expect more recognition and visibility. More importantly, the level of self-confidence and grit she expressed in the letter represents the common denominator among all the designers in this book: they believed in their talent and abilities while fighting macro and micro racial battles.

One of the most revelatory sections introduces Black architects in the US and Africa. Prempeh notes structural change in Nigerian architecture after decolonization, which involved Black architects working for public and Nigerian-owned institutions rather than European architecture firms. She wrote, “By 1970, it became mandatory for all architectural firms to include Nigerians as partners or directors.” “I’m not suggesting that there should be a quota for people of colour,” she followed up over email, “but I think it would be interesting to look at how diversity in design can be weaved into the expectations made on private enterprise.”

Writing about the cartoonist Liz Montague in the graphic design section, Prempeh gets at the heart of how cultural and experiential differences hinder Black designers’ career progress. Graphic design communicates through visual semiotics that are culturally specific. Compared to illustrators and cartoonists like Jackie Ormes (the first Black woman cartoonist in the US) and Emory Douglas (working on the Black Panther newspaper), Montague did not have a dedicated Black audience that she could count on to get the joke. By profiling Ormes and Douglas as counterpoints to Montague’s experiences (before she became the first Black woman to publish a cartoon in the New Yorker), the differences in creating for Black audiences are clear. Montague submitted about fifty cartoons to the New Yorker before one was accepted in 2019. The published cartoon shows a huge spotlight projected onto the night sky that reads “PER MY LAST E-MAIL,” a sentiment many can relate to. But a layer of subtext is added by two Black women standing beneath the projector. One says to the other, “We’ve done all we can. It’s out of our hands now,” alluding to the ways that Black women are particularly ignored or dismissed. Montague relayed to Prempeh her belief that “In the cartoon world, the white male perspective is the universal perspective, and everyone else is niche.”

Charlene Prempeh states in the book’s introduction that Now You See Me! is a curated collection and not a comprehensive survey of Black design. What makes the book groundbreaking is the attention paid to the always complicated-by-race stories behind the successes. For every Black designer whose work is presented here, Prempeh makes us wonder how many were rejected, discouraged, or harassed out of the design professions.