Feels Like Home
New Canadians speak
from their hearts
New Canadians speak
from their hearts
Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House is a space that welcomes people from all walks of life, celebrates diversity and creates connections to help build a generous community. I was approached by the organization to design an editorial that contained ten personal narratives written by new Canadian immigrants, and who were a part of the Family Literacy Outreach program. Each sincerely looked back into their cultural origins and past through invaluable objects that they brought with them, as well as their hopes in their new home, Vancouver. As an immigrant myself, I felt a deep affinity with each writers in this chapter of their lives. I sought to design a book that celebrated their stories and the objects through a layout that gave a sense of nostalgia, of home and of comfort, that reminded them, as well as other readers of simpler times. In doing so, the book demystifies our emotional connections with the objects around us through narratives, and as expressed by Yanagi Soetsu, “history may falsify, but true beauty can never be false. Rather, with the passage of time, it will shine ever more brightly into the future “ (Yanagi, 2018, p. 46). Furthermore, since the book is also intended to be used as a tool to help teach English in the organization’s tutoring program, the intentional use of varying text sizes cater to different reading fluency. While the superimposed layouts can both challenge and delight readers.
50 copies of the book were printed in monochrome on a letter size paper as spreads. The cover was printed in colour on a similar-sized cardstock paper.
Yanagi, S. (2018). The Beauty of Everyday Things. Penguin UK.
