George McCalman, the award-winning book designer, no longer designs books. The Grenada-born, Brooklyn-raised, San Francisco-living polymath describes what he now designs as “cultural artifacts.” The difference in terminology that he’s referring to illustrates the difference between the processes and visual outcomes of a Black book designer and that of a white book designer.
With the vast majority of the publishing industry being white, it’s common for designers to miss or ignore important cultural nuances because they lack the lived experiences to embed them into the design process. “I had stopped designing books for years because I was tired of the lack of cultural awareness. And it was just an internal frustration, that [white] book design, especially literary culture, is really tone-deaf about cultural nuances,” McCalman says. “They tend to just slot books in with metrics and do an academic rendering of the cultural aspects of books. But the truth is our societal culture has changed.”
McCalman’s perspective is embodied in the design of his two latest cultural artifacts. The first is Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes Across the African Diaspora, which was curated and edited by Bryant Terry and published by 4 Color Books in 2021. The second is Illustrated Black History, published by HarperOne in 2022, for which McCalman illustrated 145 Black heroes, as well as wrote, and designed.
In both projects, McCalman had to wrest creative control of the design process from mostly white publishers in order to build spaces for Black communion. “The truth is that they had a bunch of white people attached to this book when I started,” he says about creating Black Food. “And I basically stopped the process, and said, ‘No, this is going to be an all-Black team.’”
The white guilt and shame in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020 created an opening in which McCalman didn’t have to fight as hard for creative control as he may have had in the past, when his influence would have been more easily dismissed. “It was something I just brought to the table, and basically all throughout the process,” he says. “I was continually reminding the publisher, along with Bryant [Terry], that the lens of this book had to be Black, the whole thing had to be Black, and so even the process of making the book was going to be different. And so, we established a satellite team and worked on our own completely separate.”
As the creative director and designer of Black Food, McCalman was able to enforce a different process. He was involved from the very beginning of the book. He spoke with Terry daily. And to reduce the transactional reliance on email, he held weekly or biweekly production calls so that everyone talked about every aspect of the book.
The team [of Julian Knox, set designer; Oriana Koren, photographer; Lillian Kang, food stylist, and Ali Cameron, production assistant] took four months to plan the photoshoot, not just the typical one month before publication. When they all came together on the set, McCalman says it was like being in a jazz band. “We were all just riffing. There were the drums. There were the horns. It was just really beautiful and the team was just Black [even if all members were not Black],” he recalls.
While the process for Black Food may have been akin to jazz, McCalman’s experience creating Illustrated Black History is comparable to the genius of Prince (May He Rest in Power) who would play all the instruments, produce, and engineer his music as a means to fight for his sovereignty in the record industry.
“I took full control of the book. I ended up just doing all parts, because of the cultural rendering. I knew that if I wasn’t designing the book, a white person was going to be designing the book, and that is the real,” he says, “So, I was just kind of like, ‘Nope, Nope, Nope,’ I am just going to make sure that there’s just a through line of Black continuity, so when you pick this up it is illustrated Black history.”
McCalman knows that not all Black folks have his position and power in the publishing industry. “My superpower as a designer is that I know all aspects of print publication and media. I have been immersed in all aspects of it,” he says. Publishers who did not understand his approach to Illustrated Black History were told, “Bye.”
McCalman now works with emerging Black authors helping them to navigate the book publishing industry in order to obtain their own power. His own long-term cultural artifact project, an illustrated memoir and manifesto, will tell McCalman’s personal and professional life story as an intersectional gay Black man, as well as the stories of his large and extended family’s Grenadian, Scottish, and West African heritages. For McCalman, the timing to tell these stories is right. He believes that Black Americans have a lot of stories to tell and that we are masters at it. To him, these cultural artifacts are deeper than books—they represent “something genuinely new and fresh in terms of how we [Black folks] share stories.”
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