the future was yesterday

This is the opening sequence from Say Brother. Not sure when the clip is from, but Say Brother debuted in 1968 on Boston's WGBH and is now called Basic Black, making it longest running black public affairs program in history. [Hat-tip that non-blog-having (and Boston-bred) Jones Kid.]


WGBH's Say Brother archive is here.

All those black faces in the Say Brother opener remind me of work discussions I've had about how you let a user know immediately that a given black website is "black." For a lot of sites, the solution was to use a "black" color palette, anything from red/black/green to the "africana" beige-burnt umberish palette that always reminds me of mud cloth.

Those are problems that community sites get to solve in a different way, as images of the user-base become the dominant design element a la BlackPlanet.com, freeing the site up to play with other color schemes.

Community really is people, just like Soylent Green!

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