Wish You Were Here

About this work

After a class, I had a conversation with my friend and Vision Magazine collaborator, Mariana. We talked about the magazine and about hiring designers to work alongside me, and I mentioned that I had long lost sight of design as art and not just communication. She understood and challenged me to just do that, just make art.

If you know me personally, you may have heard me say that the more time I spend in Canada, the more Caymanian I feel. This is my third year overseas, but leaving home never gets easier. Being abroad in general doesn’t get easier, and now that novelty of being in a new place has worn off, I sometimes feel intense homesickness. Some nights, I miss home (the land itself and the people) more than usual. This piece speaks to that: stamps sent from a (fictional) foreign nation, featuring the people I miss the most — my family and close friends.

Tequiacá is a portmanteau of Te quiero acá “I want you here” in Spanish.

“British West Indies,” is an archaic way to refer to the British-colonised Caribbean.

Process

I used Figma for this. I made the stamp shape by Subtracting circles from rectangles, and then went through my gallery for photos of family and friends. I lastly added a Texture Labs paper texture over the stamps.

I was inspired by this Pinterest piece, which features fruit stickers. I was enchanted by this celebration of what (to most of us) is mundane and unnoticeable, and I was thinking to do something like it with a variety of stickers from made-up Caribbean nations with the through line of “Wish you were here.” That idea of “Wish you were here” evolved into an idea of stamps celebrating my family and close friends. It was also inspired by this Etsy listing selling stamp misprints.