I don’t always judge a book by its cover but Extra Bold had me feeling otherwise. Vivid and vibrant in bright, high contrast pigments of red, pink, and yellow, this book’s cover made me gasp, made me dance, and made me oh-so-curious in no particular order — all in the few seconds between encountering it, and picking it off the rack. In true “Extra Bold” spirit of valuing feminist joys and memories special of design, I can’t not share that I also came close to ascertaining such an early judgement about the book because of where I first found it.
It was in 2022 and on a quiet, busy, joyful summer morning at the Just Futures Co-Lab, led by Dr. Kush Patel at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, Bengaluru, that I chanced upon this book while I was closely engaging with the lab’s moving library. My connection with the Co-Lab, once as a former postgraduate student and now as a visiting member, is deeply personal, political, and academic. The space has made it possible for me to learn from, and for my making practice, a reflexive, relational, anti-monolithic manifesto; away from quick-fix, problem solving, anti-subversive ideologies which inspires me to continue my work. And the orientation to doing design that Extra Bold espouses is close to mutual. Thus, my first encounter with the book became both a self-invitation and an invitation from the Co-Lab to build with it a critical relationship, and enrichingly so.
Described as “part textbook and part comic book, zine, manifesto, survival guide, and self help guide” by its co-editors Ellen Lupton, Farah Kafei, Jennifer Tobias, Josh A. Halstead, Kaleena Sales, Leslie Xia, and Valentina Vergara, Extra Bold is exactly that, and so much more. Despite the book’s specificity in graphic design and mine in clothing and making as a practitioner, the book has still been a meaningful toolkit that has helped me learn how White, Eurocentric, cisheteropatriarchal power structures remain embedded in, and are reproduced through mainstream design. It has also helped me imagine feminist frameworks as I navigate different design worlds; as a maker, educator, design researcher, and writer.
Extra Bold has been a foundational source of knowledge to me in ways more than one, particularly for my work in the realm of Industrial Art and Design Practices. Whether it has been to articulate how I might keep naming and challenging power structures in and through my pedagogy on subverting the gender binary in contemporary makerspace pedagogy or to make notes about the intersectional politics related to sartorial agency, performativity, and gender, the book has reinforced for me that design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. But that it is very much relational to everyday socio-political realities and histories across place and time.
What is an anthology of diverse histories, biographies, and theories traced, written, and explained creatively and concisely is also a documentation of exclusive experimental illustrations and subversive fonts. It shelters an expansive and wide bibliography of feminist artists, designers, scholars, and activists. Each of them illuminates the question in question: design is neither neutral nor singular. More a fact than a question, to be honest. But I reference it as a question because the book encouraged me to understand and keep understanding the urgency of de-neutralising and de-universalising design deeply, and collectively so.
Away from tokenistic, feel good representation, each chapter in the book, through its critical and situated specificities, delves deep into and discusses what it means to acknowledge design as a tool of power and why this framing remains urgent. Through historical delineations and memorabilia, particularly positioned in the American context, the book pivots reflection towards asking how one might be mindful of not contributing, implicitly or explicitly, to systemic practices that manufacture inequities through systems of race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, education, and/or geographical location during any design process. Extra Bold insists on actively reflecting and acknowledging how power structures show up in design, and why it matters to disrupt such hierarchies.
The discourse built in and through the book is neither presented nor pedestalised as the ultimate touchstone to quashing hierarchies in design. Instead, the book intends to exist as one among many productions that acknowledges and honours feminist knowledges – in the plural. It would be a disservice to the labour of the contributors as well as the editors who collated this compendium if the deeply embodied knowledges brought forth are perceived as a set of do’s and dont’s. Or worse, as a “how to do inclusive design” blueprint. The book is far more nuanced and asks you to negotiate and build a relationship with the material. It asks you not to take it all as a given. It asks you not to reduce or flatten any subject matter by merely copy pasting it as is. It invites you to build feminist design knowledges through, and towards meaningful systemic change.
Whenever I come to Extra Bold, rich in citational storytelling, it is not with the intention to co-opt the knowledges shared and/or make the methodologies to doing design discussed my own, but I dwell in the collective creative spirit to continue building my own design and making practice towards social justice through commitments radical and joyful. And while I keep returning to Extra Bold ever so voraciously, for its cover too, I ground myself in its orientation like this excerpt from the book which reads,
“Seeing oneself reflected in history confers power. Being expected to succeed confers power. Tools, information, and spaces that fit our minds and bodies—all of these confer power. Each individual can leverage their own power to amplify other voices and disrupt patterns of inequity.”
Written for everyone, with an invitation from the editors to make the book one’s own, Extra Bold asks folx situated within and beyond the field how we might collectively, from our respective positions, challenge inequity and hierarchies in design worlds, practices, and ideologies we create.
And for when you sit with Extra Bold, I ask: How does this book make you feel and what are these feelings telling you about design, its possibilities, its limitations, and everything in between?
Gayatri is a maker, design researcher, educator, and writer interested in critical making and makerspace pedagogy with an orientation towards anti-colonial queer feminist politics. They are mostly found experimenting with material marked as unwanted or spending time with and taking care of plants.