Website Design

Design as Methodology

This website is not merely a container for research—it is part of the research itself. Each visual, interactive, and symbolic decision was guided by the project’s central aim: to create an immersive, reparative experience grounded in Black spatial memory and cultural sovereignty. Design here functions as both interface and argument, grounded in the principles of techno-vernacular creativity and techno-vernacular cartography. These frameworks, articulated by Nettrice Gaskins, assert that Black cultural production often emerges from improvisational, resourceful, and context-aware design strategies—what Gaskins calls "cultural remixing as a survival mechanism."¹

Symbolic Interface Design

Typography: The fonts Bayard and Harriet, designed by Tré Seals, are central to the visual identity of this site. The Harriet font draws from Black quilting traditions, with each glyph forming part of a larger pattern. This modularity allowed the site to incorporate digital quilt codes as navigational and aesthetic motifs, evoking the visual lexicon of the Underground Railroad and mapping vernacular ways of knowing through form.²

Navigation Quilt: The top menu operates as a stitched digital quilt. Each clickable thumbnail is anchored in Underground Railroad symbology. For instance, the Carpenter’s Wheel represents First Union Church, referencing Jesus as the master builder and spiritual guide, while the Dipping Gourd symbol marks the site’s navigation interface, calling on Black celestial navigation traditions. These choices are not illustrative—they embed a Black cartographic logic into the architecture of the site.³

Color and Cosmology

Site colors draw from indigo-dyed cloths, oyster shells, and drone imagery of Daufuskie’s coastlines. Indigo serves as both visual motif and historical anchor: a labor-intensive crop tied to the exploitation of enslaved Africans and a symbol of resistance and rootedness. Background textures are overlayed over photos caputed on sight to provide another layer of interactivity. These choices reflect a cosmological layering of land, labor, and memory that aligns with Gullah Geechee worldviews.

Interactive Features

Hover reveals, smooth scroll animations, and model overlays are used to cultivate a sense of discovery and spatial reverence. The goal is not spectacle, but attunement. These features slow the viewer down, encouraging attention, reflection, and embodied interaction. This approach echoes Gaskins’ concept of techno-vernacular cartography, in which digital platforms are designed to map memory, imagination, and affect alongside physical space.⁴

On pages like Memory Sites and Interaction Guide, 3D models are embedded via Sketchfab, enabling zoom, pan, and rotation. Glyph-based animations subtly activate page transitions and headers. These are not decorative flourishes—they encode return, resilience, and spiritual continuity through motion and gesture.

Memory as Interface

This is a website designed for return—to the island, to ancestral memory, and to the cultural knowledge of those long excluded from formal archives. User experience is guided by values of care, consent, and cultural specificity. Even moments of stillness are designed: pauses between transitions, hovering over invisible threads, revealing what was once obscured.

Each interaction is a micro-ritual of reorientation, honoring not only what was scanned but how it was remembered, shared, and held. In doing so, the site activates what Christina Sharpe might call "wake work"—designing with, through, and in response to the afterlives of slavery.⁵