Remixing Palettes With Hip Hop Designers
I want to be able to introduce kids to fashion design through Gucci now. So why keep them up under this umbrella of hip-hop architecture? Just call it hip-hop by design. We can now talk about jewelry making and many more professions, industrial design, furniture design. — Michael Ford via Matt Christopherson
My book Techno-Vernacular Creativity & Innovation highlights a rap cypher hosted in a high-school STEAM Lab. A rap cypher is a freestyle circle in hip hop where rappers take turns improvising lyrics over a beat. Cyphers are a collaborative aspect of the culture, emphasizing skill, storytelling, and improvisation. From this modality emerged the design cypher that, at its core, involves a distinct call or initiating phrase that is followed by a ‘response’ or answering phrase. This creates a conversational or interactive dynamic between the two elements or performers.
Last Wednesday, Michael Ford, also known as the “Hip-Hop Architect,” facilitated a workshop titled “Remix the Palette: Boston Edition”, at the Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building in Roxbury. The event was a hands-on workshop where we used Hip Hop album covers as inspiration to build digital material palettes with @materialbank. Material Bank is an online platform and logistics service for architects and designers to search for and order material samples from hundreds of brands. It should also be noted that Ford is also the architect behind the design of the Bronx Hip Hop Museum that opened briefly in 2018 (it’s temporarily closed now). The exterior of the museum is inspired by the DJ’s record collection (stacks).
Circles in hip hop culture are important. On page 36 of my book I mention ‘hip hop architecture’, which uses the design cypher to challenge young people to explore Hip Hop culture as a way to better understand, conceive, and create architecture. When I arrived at the Bolling workshop, I saw several participants sitting around a cluster of circular tables. Each chair had a tabloid-sized paper with the image flipped over and hidden from view. Later, Ford instructed us to turn the papers over to reveal album covers from local rap/r&b artists including Gang Starr (Guru), Bia, Ed O.G., and New Edition. The Gen Zers at my table did not recognize any of them.
I chose Moment of Truth, the fifth studio album by Hip Hop duo Gang Starr, released on March 31, 1998. This album is not my favorite of theirs but one of my favorite songs is on MOT: “You Know My Steez”. The music video for the song was based on the 1971 film THX 1138 and is set in an underground city where people are medically controlled. I often include this video as an example of Afrofuturism in Hip Hop.
I went through the Material Bank collection and found it limited for what I was imagining, so I finished my ‘mood board’ for Gang Starr at home. Some aspects of the workshop reminded me of the TVC ‘design cypher’, especially ‘Gather’ that includes accumulating, collecting, or spawning new instances of concepts, ideas, or works, based on prompts (ex. text, images, sounds).
I decided to include my portrait of Gang Starr rapper Guru and a few AI-generated images to reflect the duo’s album aesthetic. When Moment of Truth dropped I was living in Brooklyn like Guru who was orginally from Boston, MA. I was living in a brownstone near Bedford–Stuyvesant. Many of Guru’s lyrics mentioned different Boston and Brooklyn neighborhoods. “The Planet” from a different album is notable for this.
I got my own place in Bed-Stuy
Known to many others, as Do or Die
Malcolm X Boulevard and Gates Avenue
Smokin’ up the fat trey bags with the crew
…
I used to build with the brothers by the spot
They had to hustle but they still knew a lot
To get my haircut had to go to Fort Greene — from “The Planet”
After ‘gathering’ all of my images in the Material Bank collection or ‘Overview’ I created a ‘Mood Board’. A design mood board is a visual tool made of a collage of images, colors, textures, typography, and other elements to convey the overall style, mood, and aesthetic of a project. This is the ‘Describe’ part of the TVC design cypher process, which infers or represents something (ex. mood board) by generating words or sounds that describe the main image, sound, or idea.
The workshop ended here with Michael Ford telling us that the usual process takes a few days and includes a gallery walk and culminating event. For example, in local Boston-area youth participated in a 2023 Hip Hop Architecture Camp, at the Boston Seaport. They designed a skate park in memory of Tyre Nichols, a young black man (and skateboarder) who was fatally injured by five black police officers in Memphis, Tennessee. At the end of the camp they produced this video:
While our short workshop last week did not end with making a video or song, we did have a competition to vote for the best mood board. My board was incomplete (for reasons stated above) but the process did include a gallery walk. Michael Ford posted the winner on his Instagram page: Naomie Laguerre, AIA, NOMA designed her palette around the @bia album “Nice Girls Finish Last: Cuidado.” Here’s what Naomie said:
At the end of the night, when I got a shoutout from Cat Ford (Michael’s co-judge) and also won the grand prize, especially after seeing everyone else’s wonderfully creative mood boards, I was genuinely caught off guard and felt really honored. I recently became a licensed architect on August 15, 2025, and the imposter syndrome is real…tonight was a moment of validation. You gave that to me through this event, Mike, and I am incredibly inspired to continue creating, thinking outside the box, and finding ways to uplift our communities. Also, Bia is from my hometown, Medford, MA, so reimagining her album cover was like a full-circle moment.
During the workshop, Ford also talked about his nonprofit Hip Hop By Design (@hiphoparchitecture ) a free program which introduces youth to design via Hip Hop culture. He is expanding his program to go beyond architecture to include fashion and other branded industries.
‘This is going to be a springboard’, he says. ‘Our program has been called, ‘The Hip-Hop Architect Camp’ for 9 years, but entering into our 10th year, we’re calling it, The Hip-Hop by Design camp’. — via Kahn Santori Davidson
And here we are.