Maria: An Immigrant’s Story
Zine and Poster
Fall 2022, Adobe InDesign and marker, 11x17 poster
The Brief:
I had to interview an immigrant about their experiences, and then create a zine to represent their story. The zine would then fold out into a poster, which would visually showcase my personal takeaways of the interview and the interviewee’s story.
Conceptualization:
When I was first given this project, I had no idea what I was going to do. I didn’t know who I was going to interview or how I was going to find someone to interview, and on top of that, I wasn’t quite familiar with zines. I eventually got ahold of Immigrant Project, an organization based in Normal, Illinois, that helps local immigrants get the resources to better navigate their new home. This is where they set me up with Maria, an immigrant from Brazil who worked at Immigrant Project, who was willing to conduct an interview with me. After this interview, and after toying around with different concepts, I had decided on an idea:
Talking with Maria made me learn that immigrants oftentimes have to create their own solutions in order to navigate their new country, as oftentimes they may not have the same resources available to them as a native born, and/or may not know how to access those resources. This gave me the idea of creating a “D.I.Y.” design, in which I handmake aspects and elements myself. On top of this, immigrants navigating a new country may not understand how to get around or how to navigate, and I connected that to how I felt lost at the start of this project, which led me to adding the “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing” onto the poster, as both me and Maria have most definitely had the same thought in both of our situations, despite being vastly different.
Execution:
In order to execute my idea, I first took what I had typed from the interview into the pages of the zine, and then my response onto the back for the poster, I laid it out into a zine layout, and I printed it. I then used markers to color over the pages to relate to whatever was being talked about. I also blacked out a lot of the words, as I also wanted o showcase how a lot of times immigrants may feel as if people don’t understand them. I also used the colors blue and green to represent the Brazilian flag. For the back poster, I combined all of the different imagery that I had created throughout the pages in order to tie everything in.
