I met Kaveria Lezza, the founder of BLAC, at a local art fair. She was excited to share her mission of bringing diversity and culture to the community through communication and events. She had so much enthusiasm and great ideas, however, I noticed she didn’t have a lot of graphic materials. Since I am passionate about diversity and love learning from other cultures, I decided to offer my design services pro bono. She thought she was getting help with a flyer, and what she ended up with was a new brand image!

But there was a problem…

An unfortunate side effect of the acronym BLAC was that she had noticed that many people assumed that it was only one race of people and wasn’t for everyone. This reaction was the OPPOSITE of her mission, and only emphasizes the biases she is trying to break down. It was my personal goal to squash that close-minded thinking and find a way to get people to pause and understand what BLAC stands for – Building Love Amongst Cultures. I used a tilted heart to create the “B” in BLAC, and encouraged her to use the color red. In a time where politics made the color red feel almost unfriendly and icky, I dared to use the most stereotypical color to represent “Love”. I had to. I felt so connected to the mission of BLAC that I felt that the power of love, and positivity, and the goal of bringing people together could take the color red back and emphasize that the organization is based on love and BLAC as well as the color red is for everyone.