The Origins of the Black Dot Project: Black Wonder

The Black Dot Project stems from the work of Stacy Asher, an artist, graphic designer and educator who created a fictitious advertising campaign: Black Wonder. While in graduate school, she began working with the notion that graphic design can be utilized to raise public awareness about social issues and press for social change. At the same time, she was exploring how human experience becomes fodder for advertising and how it is reduced to a brand: a visual representation of a commercial message.

Based on these concepts, she created a logo consisting of a diamond divided into four equal sections, each a different color: yellow, white, blue, and red. She then discovered that her logo was identical to a symbol for toxicity, as well as the fact that the colors of her logo were the same colors used for the Wonder Bread logo. Based on these two discoveries, her original logo evolved into a cluster of black dots, the Black Wonder logo:



This logo symbolized resistance to commercial messaging, as well as the intrusion of brands in even the most minute and trivial aspects of everyday life. As Stacy becan focusing her exploration on advertising targeting children, the black dots in the logo also came to represent the chemical structure of sugar molecules, as well as the presence of vast quantities of sugar present in processed foods - especially the types of foods commonly marketed to children.

This work led her to conduct her first intervention, a workshop conducted with a class of first graders at a public elementary school in Berkeley, California.