The brief was a wedding of the Akan custom rather than the chapel, and the request that came with it was to find a motif that carried the weight of the occasion without reaching for the stock imagery such ceremonies usually get dressed in. The format was fixed too: a single-fold card compact enough to drop into a regular envelope, so the design had to do its work on one small surface rather than across a suite.
The answer is the mark. Me Ware Wo belongs to the age-old adinkra collection and signifies commitment, which is close enough to the ethos of the thing that it needed no invention — but it is drawn here entirely from the two initials. Four lobes interlock in a quatrefoil, each one an A or an S turned into a ring with a small drop at its crown, and graded through burgundy and pink so the pair read as one emblem. Palm fronds, the foliage that traditionally dresses a customary marriage ground, are silhouetted inside the strokes.
The ground behind it is the second invention. A patch of the kente cloth the couple were to wear is rebuilt as a weave of minute letters — S and A laid out as though they were threads on the loom — and then run tone-on-tone across the card at a low contrast so it reads as cloth before it reads as type. Everything sits in five colours, burgundy, hot pink, pale pink and two greys, and two faces only: Helvetica Neue Ultralight for anything that has to be read, Arial MT Black for anything that has to be felt.
Inside, the verse is set in Akan rather than English — “Yei nti na onipa bɔgya n’agya ne ne na, na wakɔbata ne yere ho, na wɔn baanu no akɔyɛ honam korɔ” from Ɛfesofɔɔ 5:31-32 — stacked in the heavy grey grotesque with the citation picked out in pink and the whole block held in a field of the woven pattern.
The directions card is where the system pays off. A street map of the Berko and Sunyani side of the ceremony is drawn flat, and its legend is adinkra rather than icons: Nea Onnim No Sua A, Ohu for the schools, Fihankra the house and compound for residences, Nyame Dua the Tree of God for health facilities, and the couple’s own quatrefoil for the wedding grounds. Sunyani Senior High, Holy Child Academy, Green Hill Clinic and Lawyer Obiri Boahene’s House all become legible off the same alphabet.
Research, concept and design were by Randy Biney, with art direction by Randy Biney and Jude Nyoagbe. The card was printed for a ceremony on 18 October 2014 and documented to our Behance archive the same month. View the original project on Behance.
