The concept we created for the book was simply to show Black women wearing haute couture and wearing it well. But he didn’t want to portray Black women in the norm. He liked the idea of Tiger Woods being Black but also Thai. Knowing that there are women who identify as Black but often have parents who are not Black, we wanted a more “inclusive” book. And came up with the concept of a “spectrum of beauty”, selecting models who were every shade of the diaspora. For this reason we included models who are Black and Asian, Black and European, as well as straight from the motherland. The women were intended to be as much a part of the fashion as the clothes.

It was important to Ross Love that the design of the book be different from any other publication for Black women. He didn’t want it to be another version of Essence or Ebony magazine. This was haute couture, and he wanted the book to be on par with a Vogue or Elle magazine. He wanted a big book with thick, glossy pages, full of beautiful girls who could make interesting shapes with their bodies and the clothes. He wanted lots of black and white photography to keep down the printing costs, but with splashes of color here and there to make it seem like more of a color publication than it really was.

I designed the book using Adobe InDesign. I created the overall aesthetic, chose fonts, colors, chose the paper stock, etc.

I designed the style guide to keep the designers on task and on brand.