2D Design - Creative Assignment and Classroom Connections

For my creative assignment, I decided to create 3 vector images regarding a cause that I am passionate about. I then put these vector images into Canva to create 3 t-shirt or sticker designs with 3 different slogans. I chose to center my theme on environmental conservation and workers’ rights in Puerto Rico. The Caribbean island has a long history of colonization and oppression of its indigenous people and native species of plant and animal life. I wanted my designs to shine a light on the efforts made in the past and today to preserve the island’s traditions, culture, and especially their diverse ecosystem. The first subject is a coquí, named after the distinct sound that the frog makes. In recent years, American and non-native tourists and modern-day colonizers have complained about the “noisy” frogs whose songs echo all through the night in Puerto Rico. They have even gone as far to call for the slaughter of these precious creatures. ¡Salven a las Ranas! translates to “Save the Frogs!” The second image calls for “¡A la huelga todos!” which means “Everybody on Strike!” This design is in response to the sugar plantations that took over the island in the early twentieth century. Not only were workers mistreated and had their rights violated, but these plantations decimated the land and the island’s natural beauty. Workers organized and organized strikes all over the island protesting for their rights. The third design is an image of the island’s national flower, the flor de maga, with the text “Lo que pasó a Hawaii.” This design is inspired by the Bad Bunny song LO QUE PASÓ A HAWAii, which draws connections between both islands as colonies wrongfully possessed by the American empire and stripped of their culture, natural resources, and indigenous practices.

Learning how to create vector images was a very eye-opening process for me as I struggle a lot with many forms of creating art digitally, especially given the barriers of entry with things such as cost as many of these programs require the user to pay to utilize these resources. I would like to practice more and return to this so that I can make even more complex and colorful designs. I enjoyed the learning process, and enjoyed learning more about my chosen cause even more. This would be a great lesson to teach to middle- or high-school students in the classroom or in a digital technology class like what Hirari and Neal spoke to us about. I particularly like enjoy the cross-disciplinary nature of this assignment for students, not only in the way that arts and technology intersect here, but also in how depending on what the student chooses as their subject, it integrates a third subject, in my case it was social studies. 

I took a course during my last semester of my undergrad called Art & Sports, and one class period was dedicated to the pictograms utilized in each Olympic Games. The artists that stuck out to me most were Otl Aicher for the 1972 Munich games, and Lance Wyman and Eduardo Terrazas for the 1968 Mexico City games. I kept thinking of these pictograms during this assignment, and it also led me to reflect on universal design, and how this could also be an important lesson to students on accessibility, thinking about preconceived notions of symbols and shapes, and how we can use that in a way that transcends spoken or written language for various audiences.