Inspire Oakland 2024
Presented by BRIDGEGOOD and sponsored by Adobe, I was selected as one of the top 6 designers in BRIDGEGOOD’s iconic Inspire Oakland Design Challenge out of 500 total submissions. The top 20 designers present their work to industry leaders from Amazon, Comcast, Sephora, and Stanford Health. My design was chosen for a commercial billboard in Oakland, gaining 140,000+ impressions weekly, primarily by BART and vehicular traffic. I had 1 LED billboard and 3 regular print billboards scattered amongst Oakland.
As a half Filipino half Icelandic second generation immigrant in the Bay Area, I feel like BRIDGEGOOD's mission statement on "providing opportunities and teachings to under-resourced students and job seekers of colour" really went hand in hand with my own beliefs and aspirations. I grew up in the Bay as well as overseas in Singapore and The Philippines, so I learned that art and design are wonderful tools to bring communities together. Under-resourced communities, like where I lived in the Philippines, has so much untapped potential and really benefitted when people of higher positions encouraged their creativity since it helped strengthen our community. I felt like Oakland could benefit the same way, especially through Inspire Oakland designs being posted up for inspirations.
My piece "Unleash Your Creative Beast" touches that belief by inspiring those looking at it to connect with their inner designers/artists. I wanted to encapsulate what Oakland was to me, as an outsider looking in. I decided to focus on two things that stood out to me:
The Black Panther Party--specifically the women’s museum set up on 831 center street and their focus on empowerment and education. I was also inspired by a Ted Talk by Jeff Duncan Adandre called growing roses from concrete about students in Oakland needing proper resources in order to thrive. It led me to think about the prevalence of graffiti, and how lot of the time people see it as something negative but I felt like instead of looking at it in a negative way, we should instead embrace it because it shows a form of potential. It shows that there are creatives in Oakland, they just need to be encouraged in using that creativity in a positive way, like design.