BAIDA is a non-profit organization made up of students, planners, interior designers, and architects. BAIDA approached Frontier to help tell their story across a refreshed brand strategy, identity, and web presence.

The positioning and identity design work helps tell the story of inequity within the design profession and as a way of pointing to a more inclusive future. It was immediately clear to us they're co-creating opportunities for connection: with each other, with the wider design community, and across the African diaspora. The logo we created is all about that connection, bringing shapes together to fill spaces and create intersections for cultivating expertise. And with a nod to W.E.B. DuBoi's pioneering visual communication, we created an infographic style that can generate increasing awareness of the inequities Black architects and interior designers experience in the design industries. The hope is that, through making these facts visible and working together, we can make change together over time.

It was immediately clear to us BAIDA is co-creating opportunities for connection: with each other; with the wider design community; across the African Diaspora. We wanted to celebrate those connections and so sought inspiration in infographics, a form of visualizing information that helps people see connections. In the 1890s, radical Black writer and public intellectual W.E.B. DuBois founded what has come to be regarded as the first academic department of sociology in the United States.

For the Paris Exposition in 1900, DuBois curated about five hundred photographs that presented a nuanced portrait of Black life, but also used emerging sociological principles to create a forward-thinking set of charts, graphs, and maps that complemented the images. These infographics were an experiment in visualizing the masses of data DuBois and his students were gathering.

In 2018, they were collected in book form for the first time, and we turned to their example as the primary inspiration for the motifs that give expression to BAIDA's mission of highlighting the inequity in the design professions to galvanize positive change. As with DuBois's contribution to the Paris Exposition, the use of infographics in the BAIDA identity is meant to inspire conversation.

The logo we created for BAIDA features custom, curving letterforms that lightly touch at key points—as with the crossbar in the *A*. These points can be seen as a metaphor for the emphasis on connection that is central to the organization's mission. At the same time, in many applications, the logo's organic shapes serve as a graphic device to highlight content. In addition to underscoring the organization's purpose, we aimed to create a logo that stands out from the geometric-sans default in the design industries and creates a visual language BAIDA can own.

An infographic style derived from W.E.B. DuBois's pioneering visualizations of Black life complements the logo's curves. The reference is likely to jump out to BAIDA members and others engaged in the push for equity within the design professions; for those new to DuBois's work, the citation, when understood, connects BAIDA's efforts to the longer and broader history of the fight for racial justice. We created sample infographics and a series of infographic templates the organization's members can use to advance their work.

And because much of BAIDA's work involves public advocacy, the deliverables we created focused on external communication: a flexible email-newsletter template; PowerPoint templates suitable for all kinds of presentations; a web landing page; and social-media guidelines. Taken together, these materials help BAIDA increase its public visibility and unify its appearance across contexts.