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"Make Instagram Great Again" // A Collaboration With @just.drawing.words


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Artwork by @just.drawing.words & @valster73. Do not use without permission.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m not the only one who misses the old Instagram days, when you could just go to Instagram and scroll down to your heart's content and see the posts of all the people you follow, with no algorithm telling you what you should or should not see; where we had the freedom to make our own judgment on what we wanted to see and not, without having to spend so much time choosing and engaging just so that these posts of the people we follow keep appearing in our feeds.

So when I saw this campaign/initiative by Matthieu Tarrin (IG @tarwane) and James Lewis (IG @jamesllewis) about making Instagram great again, I knew I wanted to participate too. Part of the challenge of this campaign was to collaborate with another creative person, so when Sonia from @just.drawing.words and @soniaydesigns approached me to do a collaboration with her for this, I was more than happy to oblige. I have been following her for a while now and I’m a fan of her work! (I was also supposed to do another collaboration for this with someone else but he fractured his arm in the middle of the collaboration, and so it’s currently postponed).

I wish I could take credit for this awesome collaboration piece but I can’t. It was all Sonia’s idea! Sonia had this idea where she wanted the word ‘Instagram’ changed to just the icon, but wanted to change the lens to a heart to send a more positive message, and to represent the great part of Instagram: community and collaboration. I loved the idea and couldn’t agree more. So, Sonia created the words ‘make’ and ‘great’, and I did the Instagram logo and the word ‘again’.

I also love the fact that we combined both digital and analog lettering for this piece. To help visualize the idea and to help figure out the spacing of the words, Sonia created a sketch first, which I then used as a template to create the icon and the word ‘again’. The biggest challenge for me was creating the blending of the colors for the Instagram icon. I had to do a few practice runs first before I created the actual icon. After I was done with my part, I took of photo of it and send it back to Sonia, where she added her lettering digitally to the photo, and I have to say, she made it look INCREDIBLE!

I’m so grateful that Sonia approached me to do this collaboration and so honored that I got to work with her. She is truly incredible! She was really helpful and accommodating, and just great to work with. I hope we can collaborate again in the near future J.

Below I've included a bit of the process for you guys to see.



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