Preserving Black Presence

02 / OVERVIEW

Preserving Black Presence is an initiative focused on preserving Black heritage places and supporting the people and organizations carrying their histories forward.

For DesignPhiladelphia 2026, PPW Creative transformed nearly two years of research, storytelling, and community collaboration into an exhibition exploring Black Philadelphia across time, place, culture, and community.

03 / VISUAL SYSTEM

What does Black design look like?

The visual system began with a question: how might the exhibition challenge European modernist conventions while bringing the same level of intention, rigor, and presence to a distinctly Black design language?

Typography draws from the history of Black design, Black artist movements, and woodblock printing, interpreted through a contemporary lens. Historical references are paired with modern type, color, and digital forms to create a language that belongs neither entirely to the past nor the future.

Preserving Black Presence visual identity development showing typography, color, mapping, and photography

Preserving Black Presence exhibition design development showing editorial layouts, mapping, archival photography, and cohort information

04 / DESIGN APPROACH

Past, present
+ future.

The exhibition brings together material spanning from the beginnings of Black presence in Philadelphia through the present. The design needed to hold that history without feeling entirely retro or entirely contemporary.

Cursive and print-inspired forms reference earlier visual traditions, while pixelated elements introduce a digital, future-facing language. Together, they create a visual continuum between Black Philadelphia's past, present, and future.

Preserving Black Presence graphic design applications

05 / GRAPHIC → ENVIRONMENT

From visual system to physical space.

Typography, color, photography, mapping, and graphic forms were developed as a shared language across the exhibition. Color overlays bring archival photography into the same visual world as contemporary imagery, while the graphic system moves between printed materials, interpretive displays, murals, and the surrounding environment.

Preserving Black Presence interior exhibition concept — Interior exhibition rendering

Preserving Black Presence exterior exhibition concept — Exterior exhibition rendering

06 / MAPPING BLACK PHILADELPHIA

Place as an organizing structure.

Mapping connects the exhibition's stories to the physical city. A large-scale central map brings together people, institutions, businesses, cultural moments, and historic sites across generations of Black Philadelphia.

A neighborhood-based color system carries that sense of place throughout the exhibition, connecting individual organizations and stories back to the larger geography of the city.

Preserving Black Presence map of Black Philadelphia

07 / THE EXHIBITION

Multiple ways into the story.

The finished exhibition brings the visual system into a layered physical experience through mapping, archival and contemporary photography, cultural objects, books, murals, digital experiences, cohort resources, and opportunities for visitors to add their own knowledge to the evolving story of Black Philadelphia.