Localizing Design: The Impact of Community-Centered Practices on the Things We Build

An interview with interdisciplinary designer Agyei Archer

C/Change: Tell us more about who you are and how you got into design.

Agyei Archer: I’m Agyei, and I’m a type designer, graphic designer, and creative director. I also run a tech startup back at home in Trinidad. Initially, I was a software developer. I realized while building layouts that I really enjoyed looking at them more than I enjoyed writing the logic. I’ve always had a relationship with my design practice that was always referential to or dependent on coding. It’s a practice that kind of evolved really organically, but it is rooted in this combination of making design and code work together.

C/C: You work a lot with found type, and type generally left out of the “canon.” What does type say about culture and identity?

A: I think that you can tell a lot about a place’s history by the way that it deploys type. You can look at parts of even what we would call very complex, developed cities like New York, and they’re still really heavily dependent on hand-painted signs. Why? Well, there’s cultural relevance there. It often feels better. It’s also cheaper – there’s also a practical reality around that. We are all subject to a relativity that’s something like found type can help us get into a little bit more. The conversation that a typeface like Helvetica has with us is that this can apply to as many of you as possible because your experiences are common, and your referential points are common, and more and more and more our reference points are diverging. There’s an individualism that is becoming so apparent; the genericism of type is going to lose its shine. I feel like that’s what vernacular type tells us about ourselves. I think we can look at the way that it’s evolved and see that it’s almost hand in hand with the exclusion of individuals.

*Lettering and editorial typography for Deepest Dreamer by Van Hanos and Stephen Intlekofer*

C/C: I haven’t thought about type in those terms, in terms of almost a monoculture of type. I wonder how the platforms we use can foster these more diverse graphic and visual cultures.

A: The reality around projects that make a lot of fonts available is that they are run by massive tech companies. Many are bemoaning this ubiquity of type – everybody’s like, we’re over-flooding the industry with fonts, my unique perspective is getting drowned out by free fonts. But I also look at platforms like TikTok. I look to TikTok for inspiration when I think about how the world is going to evolve. It’s going to be far less about the typeface that you use, and more about what you use it to say. 20 years ago you could make a typeface and say, I want this typeface to say these things. Then a user could identify with those things and use it for that thing. It’s that same kind of tunneling of individualism, where the specificity of type is now in a way out of the window – I can use Helvetica to say anything but I can also use Papyrus. I think there’s a subjectivity in looking at any type and saying, yeah, I know, it’s meant for this, but I want to use it like this. The platforms are, in a way, flattening this for us. Anybody can now use a Sans and say what they want to say on TikTok. I have three or four font options on TikTok. Why do I need your font? I’m able to say anything I want on TikTok, how is your font going to help me actually express a thought in a unique way? I think the questions around fonts now revolve around whether there is a story that you’re trying to tell that I can identify with, or if there is something about you as the type designer that I can identify with. Is there something about my particular history that this type is referencing? It just means that the reasons why you’re designing type have to change.

C/C: How does this flattening of the semantics of fonts change your practice as a type designer?

A: I couldn’t stand a chance in a world where the genericism of Helvetica had a better value proposition than anything I could make. If type was just about genericism and must be appealing to as many people as possible, I live in a country with 1.4 million people – I would never be able to have a sample size large enough to prove that point. But if type now is about individual expression, and it’s about finding a way to say what you want to say, anybody can make type that can impact, and that can connect with a larger amount of people. In a way, the odds are stacked toward people like me more so than they are stacked towards a corporate entity.

I think the questions around fonts now revolve around whether there is a story that you’re trying to tell that I can identify with, or if there is something about you as the type designer that I can identify with.

C/C: So moving toward more general design thinking, how does design function as a communication tool for culture? How do you characterize the relationship between design and visual expression and culture?

A: It’s a good question. I’ve had a tricky relationship with design as a job for a while because I do really believe that the only reason that we have art schools is so that we remain inside of the system that allows us to let commercialism masquerade as expression. There is a lot of confusion for me with feeling massively fulfilled from the perspective of creative self expression, while also knowing that I am a participant in systemic inequality. I feel like the idea of self expression has become secondary, to me, to the idea of designing for public good. I think that design can have a lot of utility for public good. I want to be a part of a systemic change with design that, by nature, goes deeper than the surface. There’s a big reality around the fact that design can be quite good outside of my personal creative fulfillment, and I would like to center my relationship with design more around the people that it impacts.

C/C: Could you tell us more about the studio you founded, Unqueue, and how these ideas about design informed that project?

A: In 2020, when I came back home, I was just doing strictly type design. But at home there was a big demand for pivoting to digital commerce because every business was shut down. A lot of people messaged me and asked, hey, can you help us get online and sell stuff? It felt difficult to say no, I’m not doing web development anymore. I have the skills, I have the deployment tools. I’m also one of the few people at home who is making their own software, because a lot of software in Trinidad is retrofitted from code coming from elsewhere. I decided I would start a new company, and this company would be a platform for these small businesses to get online and start selling things. I think it’s done really well. We won a bunch of awards across the Caribbean. Something that kind of evolved really naturally was that the way that you make products in California or in New York cannot be the same way you design for businesses at home in Trinidad because of all of the realities that make our situations different. There wasn’t really a precedent for making work at home. We developed our proprietary processes, we have a set of inputs for understanding our market that don’t work in an American market. There’s a narrowed focus on the Caribbean context, but with the same kind of world class, global focus, and it just kind of evolved out of that. So about two years after we started, we felt like we could take some of those methods, and help other people achieve their goals as well. Right now, we’re working with a bunch of other Caribbean startups and government institutions to get their products developed to the same standard that we would have made.

*Design oversight for the first eCommerce software built in the Caribbean*

C/C: I’ve never really thought about how much like building something from the ground up within communities, in terms of a sort of local coding process, really affects the outcome.

A: It absolutely does. For example, most countries have a Lyft replica, or a DoorDash replica, right? But if you look at the replication of the business models, you can replicate DoorDash in India, because you have an analogous population, a bigger population in India. But you can’t replicate that model in Trinidad and expect it to be successful. We have less than 1% of the population. Planning a business like it was in Silicon Valley won’t get us to the goals that we’re looking for. You have to be doing it for a different reason. Making the kind of work that we’re making in the Caribbean, we have the ability to have a more wholehearted, social focus, because we don’t have to be accountable for making anybody a million dollars. I don’t want us to end up in a place where we’re just making money, because at the end of the day, if it’s just that, then the work is eventually going to fall off, or the people are going to not want to do it anymore. A big part of holding on to what we’ve built together for me is making sure that we are doing it for the right reasons, every step of the way.

C/C: What’s next for Unqueue?

A: Our long-term plan was always to build infrastructure. There’s now a tech boom in the Caribbean, and it’s like a gold rush. In the time of a gold rush, we want to be the guys who sell picksaxes and shovels. We are talking to the government now about the same small business platform that we created and open sourcing it so that it could be free for the general population to use for small business ventures, but also, so that local tech entrepreneurs can access the code quickly and build platforms on top of it. Our plans are really to have a wider Caribbean impact. I don’t want to say global impact, because I think that the global impact that we want to make is the Caribbean impact. The Caribbean is a part of the world, and it’s a part of the world that is moving the global economy forward. We want to be able to maximize the value that we could return in that particular section. In the type world, I think global because I think about language support and a global context, but when it comes to the studio, I really want to keep us focused on the Caribbean as much as possible. I want to stay focused on solving the problems that we have at home.