Matchmaker (Illustration & brand)

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Created for the Matchmaker.co.za revamp in October 1998, this brand redesign took on a romanticised Indian theme, incorporating a fantastical world based on Indian designs, landscapes and architecture as well as the local Durban culture.




Using a landscape format for the key sections of the site, Stephen illustrated the home/landing page and created some iconic design motifs.



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Published Works

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2015-2024 Fiction: 'Land of Light' : 'Imagine Africa 500' speculative fiction anthology (2015/2016) (Speculative Fiction). 8,000 words. Read more...   (Malawi)/(UK reprint 2017) 'Veiled ':  2016 'Beneath This Skin' Edition of Aké Review (2016) (Fiction). 1,450 words.  Read here...   (Nigeria) 'Water' : 'The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story! Vol.2' anthology (2017) (Fiction). 3,100 words.  Available on Amazon  or Read Online (South Africa) 'Sub Migratio' : the debut edition of Enkare Review (2017) (Speculative Fiction). 3,500 words.  Read here...   (Kenya) 'Inktober' : 2018 edition of 'The Bloody Parchment' (2018) (SF/Horror). 1,250 words.  Available on Amazon .  (South Africa) 'The Girl with Two Bodies' : The Kalahari Review (Nov 2018) (Fantasy). 7,050 words.  Read here...  (South Africa) 'Journal of a DNA Pirate' : Volume 3 of 'AfroSF' (Dec 2018) (SF). 8,150 words.  ...
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Adinkra Font & Book Title Design

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It was a real pleasure to be able to create something unique for a friend and Sauúti Collective colleague – Cheryl Ntumy – for her new novella coming out with Atthis Arts press: a custom display typeface and title design. Design & Typography: Stephen Embleton, Illustration: Akintoba Kalejaye Find Atthis Arts here. A latinised version of the Adinkra alphabet from Ghana (because Cheryl is Ghanaian!), it has some fantastic characteristics and a very modular form which made it a fun, yet simple, design to work on. I first focused on the letters needed for Cheryl's book cover, and then fleshed out the other characters, as well as creating a "light" version. One happy accident for the cover design was incorporating the "working" components of each letter in the design itself. i.e. when I work on fonts, I find the common weights (stroke thicknesses) and common shapes, and move these around to exact positions. And by making them separate bright colours enables m...
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ANNOUNCED: Bloomsbury Academic Acquires Essay Anthology

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  UPDATE: Cover Reveal April 2024 Great to part of this! Thanks, to Eugen Bacon, who initiated this over a year ago: Bloomsbury Academic will be publishing this essay anthology covering a HUGE range of topics and insights within Afro-Centred Futurisms, including my essay “Cosmologies and Languages Building Africanfuturism”. Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction is an accessible work of criticism that will appeal to scholarly readers and broader enthusiasts of Afrocentric and speculative literature.  British Fantasy Award winner Eugen Bacon (ed.)'s AFRO-CENTERED FUTURISMS IN OUR SPECULATIVE FICTION, an anthology of original artistic essays infused with creative excerpts from award-winning African writers on the futurisms in their speculative fiction; a new kind of African study in an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, 'becoming', black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmolo...
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