Historical Black Publications Inspire Contemporary InDesign Projects
Silas Monroe
Los Angeles, California
Virtual
February 16, 2023
3:45–4:00 p.m. Pacific — Networking
4:00–5:45 p.m. Pacific — Presentation
Silas Munro and his company, Polymode, use InDesign and other modern tools of graphic design to create award-winning projects from book design to museum displays. But what animates him? What are his light bulb moments? How does he do it?
No easy answer, of course. But among his influences are the rich lineages of publications representing many facets of Black life, from the 1900–1919 Colored American Magazine to the iconic oeuvre of the Johnson Publishing Company’s Ebony and Jet. In this presentation, Munro will explore a selection of significant Black publications from the 20th century through the design of their layouts into their cultural relevance. He will talk about how these histories inspire Polymode’s poetic research process when applied to book design and his work as a design historian.
About the Presenter
Silas Monroe
Silas Munro is an artist, designer, writer, curator, and partner of Polymode, a studio that leads the edge of contemporary graphic design for clients in the cultural sphere. Collaborations include the City of Los Angeles, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, David Kordansky Gallery, MoMA, and MOCA. He is a curator and author of Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest that opened at Letterform Archive in 2022. Munro’s writing appears in the book, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Munro expanded this research as a co-author of the first BIPOC centered Design History course: Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design, which will be published in book form. Munro holds an MFA from CalArts and a BFA from RISD. Munro is Founding Faculty and Co-Chair for the MFA in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
