Notice anything different about us? 😉

Since we launched our first website all the way back in 2015, Skin Deep has done a lot of growing – so it was high time our online space joined us in our future. We’ve been working hard behind the scenes for months with our collaborators Good Praxis and Outlandish, and we are now proud to finally show you the new yard!

We think about our website as one of the three main ‘spaces’ we work in – alongside our print magazine and live immersive events. Our goal for the site is to create a space that’s active and alive, and that does justice to the incredible work that our contributors share with us. We want the site to invite our community to engage deeply with us – whether that’s by reading and sharing stories, coming to an event or workshop, submitting your own creative work, or getting in touch about working together on something exciting…

This is only the first iteration of the new online space, so as we keep building and improving it over time, we want feedback! Is the site accessible and easy to use? Can you find what you’re looking for? Do you enjoy spending time here? Please let us know (by email, Twitter or Instagram), and with your help we can continue to make our online space work for our community of Black and PoC creatives and activists. 

We want to encourage exploration and discovery, so we’ll let you check out the new yard in your own time – but we can’t resist highlighting some of our favourite features:

• The background colour gradient on each article (like this one) is auto-generated from the featured photo or illustration, how dreamy is that?
• The whole website is super light and super fast. That means internet connectivity will never dictate who can participate – anyone can join in the fun, no matter what speeds they’re working with.
• Our entire archive of articles and videos has been re-homed in new categories! In Learnings you can discover something you might not know: an introduction to a new or radical idea, or an exploration of an underreported place or time. In Reflections you can ruminate on personal narratives, lived experiences, and enquiries into ourselves and our relationships as people. Finally, in Actions you can find out how to translate all your learnings and reflections into practice, with guides, resources, and interviews with activists and organisers. (Regular visitors will be pleased to see that our Skin Deep Meets interview series hasn’t gone anywhere!)

Massive thanks to everyone who worked on the site: developers Maciej and Igor, designers Chris and Caitlin, kind cat herder Kayleigh, and the whole Skin Deep team. Extra special props to amazing trainee developer Nafisa, who we’re so happy was able to join the team.

Passing the mic to Kayleigh from Outlandish: “This was a dream project for me, I really wanted to work with a femme team committed to long-term racial justice and found this with Skin Deep. You also gave us the chance to bring Nafisa onto the team, and that was hugely important to me. It was her first commercial project, and what a project to work on <3”

Skin Deep is all about making space for joy and dreaming for Black people and people of colour. We hope the new platform will be a happy home for the Black and PoC artists and activists whose work helps guide us towards justice.

That’s enough from us, over to you! Get stuck in, explore the articles and events, buy a magazine, and let us know if you find any 404s…

P.S. This iteration of the website was funded by part of a grant from Arts Council England, but we will need more funding to realise our vision of an online home that evolves in conversation with our community’s needs. If you or your organisation can help us with that, please get in touch with Anu or Georgie.

Stay in touch! Subscribe to our monthly newsletter.