Passing Redesign

Branding

My Role

Behind the Brief

Redesigning Passing was an experimental exercise in fine-tuning meaning into visual form. My challenge was translating a beloved book's contents into a thoughtfully reflective image on its cover.

Nella Larson's remarkable novel narrates a story of two black childhood friends, one fair complexion and one deep, and their monumental reunion during the New Negro Movement of 1920s Harlem. Entranced by the magnetic forces of one another, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield taunt the limits of Blackness, sexuality, privilege, and control to become closer. The short story bounces from Clare and Irene's perspective to make sense of their whirl-winding connection in the turbulence of infatuation, shame, jealousy, and freedom.

For this task, I aimed to update Larson's 1929 novel to stand out on modern bookstore standards. Passing's previous covers display flapper illustrations and dated photographs. My approach needed to be contemporary. However, I still wanted to reference analog. To cite the narrative, I focused on reflecting the central themes around the perception of racial identity. The duality interested me, and I explored it with paint and paper.

I manipulated white paint and black ink with different colored paper substrates. I was thinking about concepts like whitewashing and black fishing and how impactful assumptions can be when operating rigid systemic and social discrimination. I visually enjoyed the contrast of the different mediums and how passing as a different race can be abstracted into material. They resulted in dynamic and poetic approaches to conversations about race.