Presented in partnership with the Brooklyn Museum, Instagram’s #BlackDesignVisionaries aims to uplift, center, and invest in rising Black designers and Black-led design businesses who offer experimental expressions of Black culture and have a powerful vision for the future. ¶
The Brooklyn Museum named Tré Seals of Vocal Type one of its #BlackDesignVisionaries for 2021, recognizing his innovative work in typography. As part of the grant, Seals was challenged to create a capsule collection for the museum shop. He went back into our archives, unearthing and modernizing the museum’s first logo. Seals’ typographic genius comes to life with a capsule of graphic tees, sweatshirts, hats, and bandanas—each a modern reinterpretation of a piece of our museum’s history. ¶
To ensure that the firm had an identity that was unapologetically black and powerful, Vocal created a bespoke typeface inspired by the remnants of the People’s Free Food Program. ¶ When Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the party in 1966, their goal was to end police brutality in Oakland. But a faction of the Civil Rights Movement led by SNCC member Stokeley Carmichael began calling for the uplift and self-determination of African-Americans, and soon black power was part of their platform. * ¶ With this new concept in mind, the Black Panthers started the People’s Free Food Program. This program provided free food to black and other oppressed people. The intent of the Free Food Program was to supplement the groceries of black and poor people until economic conditions allowed them to purchase good food at reasonable prices. The Free Food Program provided two basic services to the community: 1. An ongoing supply of food to meet their daily needs. 2. Periodic mass distributions of food to reach a larger segment of the community than could be serviced from the ongoing supply. The community was provided with bags of fresh food containing items such as eggs, canned fruits and vegetables, chickens, milk, potatoes, rice, bread, cereal, and so forth. A minimum of a week’s supply of food was included in each bag. * ¶
The final typeface, aptly named “Impactful,” is inspired by the grocery bags of the People’s Free Food Program. ¶ While they only needed an all caps headline typeface, I thought it would be important for the typeface to have some versatility, should they need it. Characters such as ‘C,’ ‘G,’ 'S,’ and most numerals allow the graphic designer to switch between flat and angled terminals, allowing for two different tones. ¶
