The One Club for Creativity is a non-profit organization that exists to support and celebrate the success of the global creative community. Home to The One Show, Art Directors Club, Type Directors Club, Young Guns, Young Ones, and Allies in Recruiting, TOCC is a diverse community of creative thinkers and doers who believe creativity is the most powerful element to business success. ¶ Since 1996, their elite portfolio-based competition, Young Guns, has taken the profiles of young creative professionals already on the rise and helps elevate them even further. And while the program has made major strides since the early days, there's always room for more diversity. ¶ Enter COLORFUL: A Prelude To Young Guns 19. Ahead of the 2021 Young Guns competition, TOCC teamed up with acclaimed first-generation Filipinx designer and Young Guns 8 winner Rich Tu to co-found a free portfolio competition and a grant exclusively for young BIPOC creative professionals who qualify for Young Guns — they just haven't entered and won it yet. ¶
To prepare for the launch of this fantastic competition, Rich Tu collaborated with Tré Seals of Vocal Type to design a bespoke wordmark and typeface for launch of the 2021 competition.
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. ¶
