Express The Many Ways Being Black is Amazing With OurBlackCool.com

Do you have swag, are you a geek, an intellectual, got a little soul, and are Black? Well now there is a new interactive web platform OurBlackCool.com that lets you express how Black – in its most diverse ways- is cool.

Kristy Tillman, a designer at global design consultancy IDEO and Sian Morson, a technologist who runs a Bay Area mobile agency, Kollective Mobile created OurBlackCool.com out of inspiration from Rebecca Walkers’ book Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness. 

The book consist of a collection of Black writers that encode their ideas of Black cool through essays on topics like fashion, art, and music. Walker assigned each story an element that serves as the title of each essay.

Founders Tillman and Morson worked closely with Walker to come up with elements for OurBlackCool.com to express the essence of her book through the Web.

“We decided to use the Web so the idea of the book could reach more people,” Tillman says. “We wanted something that could live and grow organically, and could express the diversity of blackness.”

The site enables users to add their element of Black cool by logging into Twitter and uploading media in which they feel reflects them. Some of the elements include: soul, geek, hipster, intellectual, authenticity, with several others to choose from.

The site has similarities to Pinterest, but Tillman says although similar, the intent and purpose are vastly different.

“Our purpose is to build a periodic table of Black cool inspired by Walker’s book and more specifically her quote ["Let us build a periodic table of Black cool, element by element..."]” Tillman says. “What we hope is that OurBlackCool.com becomes a destination to reflect our diversity and contribution to global culture.”

75 people have shared their element of Black cool since its launch earlier this week. Go to OurBlackCool.com to share yours.

About the Author
Kiera is the Editor at Black Web 2.0. Connect with her on Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.
See all posts by Kiera A. Manison.