Scholastic: Share Black Stories
Creative Direction · Campaign Design · Photo Art Direction
Social Media · Campaign
Share Black Stories is a social campaign celebrating Black voices, stories, and creators across Scholastic’s publishing portfolio. I led the creative direction, developing the campaign concept and visual system while overseeing photography and design across a month of social content. Inspired by the expressive artwork of the books in the Share Black Stories Collection, the identity brings together bold color, handmade textures, and graphic forms to create a flexible system rooted in joy, creativity, and individuality.
Developed in collaboration with Scholastic’s Black Employee Resource Group, whose feedback helped ensure the campaign approached its subject with authenticity and care. Created with designer Rose Schisler and photographer Josh Loring.
Working with an existing identity created by illustrator Brian Collier, we looked to the artwork within the Share Black Stories collection to build out a broader visual world for the campaign.
Painterly textures, expressive brushwork, collage, and vibrant color became the foundation of the system, drawing particular inspiration from the work of Collier, Keisha Morris, and Brian Pinkney. Collage also provided a connection to the work of influential Black American artists including Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold.
The geometric pattern within the existing Share Black Stories identity—originally inspired by Collier’s We Are Here—became another recurring element, connecting the campaign back to the visual language of the books themselves.
Inspiration
Style Guide
We built a flexible visual system designed to support a full month of content while allowing each book to retain its own personality. A library of geometric borders, organic shapes, expressive color combinations, and painted textures could be recombined across photography, book features, and quote-driven posts.
To give the campaign a tactile, handmade quality, we created physical paper cutouts and painted backgrounds alongside digital graphic elements. These materials became both photographic sets and components of the broader design system, creating a consistent visual language that could continually shift in color, composition, and scale.
Design System
