DESIGNs things to
tell meaningful stories

Rachel Hellgren

Design Issues
Cover Design

Design Issues is the first American academic journal to examine design history, theory, and criticism. The concept for this cover design illustrates the reciprocal relationship between land and body: in healing one, we heal the other. It honors the Black- and Indigenous-led grassroots work being done to restore and reclaim land ownership and food sovereignty, work that groups like Soul Fire Farm and the Black Family Land Trust have made central to their mission.

Woven into the earth is an excerpt from a speech by W. E. B. Du Bois, calling young Black farmers back to the land of the South, framing it as ground for their continued fight for racial equality and civil rights. Du Bois speaks to the “thinker, the worker, and the dreamer,” echoed in the three figures above tending to the earth.

The excerpt is taken from “Behold the land, October 20, 1946,” a closing address Du Bois gave to nearly 1,000 interracial delegates of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, providing a historical framing for the cover’s concept.

The type is set in the Du Bois typeface, designed by Vocal Type Co., reinforcing a connection to Du Bois’ original visualizations.

Hands were drawn to be “dancing” in the layers of the soil, holding seeds and foliage to communicate the active relationship between land and body, and what the land gives those who tend it.

The silhouettes draw from photographs of Black sharecroppers found through the Library of Congress, keeping the design historically tied to the world surrounding Du Bois’s 1946 speech. Though Black sharecroppers endured racial violence and economic exploitation, the figures are recontextualized here; their presence acknowledges the unjust history, while paired with Du Bois’ speech, also point toward a reimagined future.

Appearing almost as suns or moons, the burnt orange circles provide a slight Afrofuturist influence, inviting ideas of a future in which relationships to the land and Black bodies on the land are no longer defined by the past.