caguas
Rebranding your own hometown can be a personal experience. However, rebranding a town you haven’t lived in for seven years is a personal challenge. It is important to do the work with grace, acknowledging that one’s memories of the place we grew up in might not exactly reflect its current reality. It is labor or love and care, and a great responsibility.
I grew up in Caguas, Puerto Rico, a city located within a valley south of San Juan. I’ve always thought of my hometown as a place of dualities: a city surrounded by nature; an urban space surrounded by rural communities; a culture ruled by both tradition and innovation, where history and progress can coexist. These are the values I wanted to focus on during this project, and highlight the strength behind these seemingly opposing qualities.
I grew up in Caguas, Puerto Rico, a city located within a valley south of San Juan. I’ve always thought of my hometown as a place of dualities: a city surrounded by nature; an urban space surrounded by rural communities; a culture ruled by both tradition and innovation, where history and progress can coexist. These are the values I wanted to focus on during this project, and highlight the strength behind these seemingly opposing qualities.
My rebrand of Caguas can be summarized in one term: digitally organic. I wanted to capture the sense of duality in a way that was not too obvious. You can see this in the logo, a digital mark that uses negative space and features irregular ridges. As we see all the elements come together—as we see how the logo interacts with the selected typeface, Proxima Nova, or how the logo itself can create a great variety of patterns—we can clearly see how the “digitally organic” concept is carried through.
If there is one thing that this project taught me is the importance of meaning behind form. This project required me to think about a subject in an emotional, visceral way. How can we portray emotions through design without falling into cliché? How can we truly use design to make people feel something, feel seen? Those are questions I haven’t fully answered, but this project was certainly a great start.
