April 2026 // Personal
One of my promises to myself for 2026 was to put my design out there more and take more initiative to reach out to people, organizations, and businesses, inquiring about a need for design work. While things have definitely started out slow, I found another way to get myself out there: competitions.
Design contests were something that would pop up on my Instagram feed every now and then, but in the past couple of months, I've been seeing more and more of them. While I tend to send myself a ton of things to reference for later, most of the time they end up going unused. This time, though, I decided I needed to commit, and Dyonyzine's Issue 6 cover art contest seemed like the perfect opportunity.
In all honesty, I should've done more research before diving into the project. The theme of this issue is food, and how a meal is never just a meal. To me, this left a lot up to interpretation, but I knew the direction I wanted to go in. Food doesn't come from nowhere - it comes from life. That idea, combined with the monochrome black-and-white color palette, pushed me in a darker direction, and I feel like I accomplished that goal.
While Dyonyzine is an Asian-American founded magazine, they publish work from all backgrounds. I feel like food is an incredibly large part of culture, and looking back, I think I missed the mark on that aspect a bit. While the topic is very open-ended, and what I created is still work I'm incredibly proud of, I'm not sure it fully succeeded in terms of what the prompt was asking for.
My work includes eyes, as I wanted to bring a sense of awareness to what we eat, where it comes from, and how it all comes from life, something that shouldn't be taken for granted. For my first variation, I focused on a mouth being open, screaming or eating, with eyes inside it, as if what's being consumed is watching it happen. My second submission is a bit more literal: a plate with guts on it, an eyeball off to the side, and a hand going in with a fork.
While I don't expect to win the competition, I'm grateful for the opportunity and happy that I challenged myself in this way. I always feel like I need to keep practicing and improving my design skills, and while I've been struggling to find client work, I want to keep at it in the meantime and continue building my portfolio, especially through projects like this.
