---

As apart of my final project in Typography 2 class, we were tasked to create a series of three posters dedicated to the poems centered around different topics. 

For each poet that I was given, I noticed a pattern in which they discuss their experiences as apart of a marginalized group that they are apart of. While reading each author’s poems, they include passages in which they uplift the marginalized group they are apart of. 

While not a method, the colors on each poster represent a flag in which the poet originated or aligns themself with; Gwendolyn Brooks’ poster representing the Pan-African flag, Javier Zamora representing the colors of El Salvador’s flag, and finally with Monica Youn’s colors representing both the South Korean and United States flag

Each poster includes certain letters or accents originating from their motherland (Latin characters for Zamora and Hangul/Korean words in accordance Monica Youn’s Korean heritage). Gwendolyn Brooks’ heritage is apart of the African diaspora in America, and for that reason, there was intention in not including any kind of African language to her poster, regardless or not if she knew where her lineage came from.

The fonts that I had selected for this project needed to be accessible for these written languages while presenting itself to be block-like to fit the theme of “fitting outside the box”.

There’s no concrete rule to the rotation of the header text, as I reflected more about the history in which the poet arrived to America. The header text in Youn’s poster is meant to relate how her parents immigrated to the U.S., (referring to the travelling text from the top right to the middle-left) and to when they offically settled to Texas (the aligned, straight text of American and and). Zamora’s poster text intentionally travels around the margin to represent how he travelled and immigrated to the U.S. Finally, Brooks’ text is intentionally left as being read left-to-right and does not move across the margins because of her background as an African-American.

Each poster includes certain letters or accents originating from their motherland (Latin characters for Zamora and Hangul/Korean words in accordance Monica Youn’s Korean heritage). Gwendolyn Brooks’ heritage is apart of the African diaspora in America, and for that reason, there was intention in not including any kind of African language to her poster, regardless or not if she knew where her lineage came from.

Gwendolyn Brooks’ poems often discuss about the Black experience during the American Civil Rights movement during the 1960s. She tells her Black readers to embrace being Black and to see the beauty (or Glory) in which they are Black in Primer for Blacks (1980).

Javier Zamora’s poems often talk about immigration and his general experience as an immigrant in the U.S. In one of his poems, Nó, Actually, Soy Salvadoreño (2020) he speaks up about how many generalize him as a Mexican immigrant and encourages other El Salvadorians to correct those who stereotype them. 

Some of Monica Youn’s poems reflect her identity as a second generation child of Korean immigrants. In Youn’s recent poetry collection, From From (2024), she writes about the Asian-American experience. In one excerpt between the narrator and their mother, the mother says that Americans can not tell the difference between taekwondo and karate, (or be general, different Asian cultures). 

The concept of these posters series is centered around the margins of each poster (the marginalized) and in these margins, I extract or paraphrase a quote from each poet in their writings in which they empower the marginalized group they belong to.