Nā Hopena A‘o (HĀ), A Sense of Belonging

As part of our Capstone project for my high school’s second year Graphic Tech class, we were tasked to create a magazine using Adobe applications. In groups, we were assigned a topic based on the Hawaii State Department of Education’s framework Nā Hopena A‘o (HĀ), and my group had gotten “A Strengthened Sense of Belonging”. We were to include written pieces about what it meant to have a sense of belonging in one’s school and community, as well as provide a fieldwork log documenting the process of creating our magazine. At the end of the semester, our magazines were displayed at a showcase, and we had received the “Best in Content” award for our magazine.

I drew the arms and hands for the cover of the magazine using Adobe Illustrator and formatted our written pieces and images in Adobe InDesign. My partner, Summer, was responsible for the background art, as well as some written pieces in the magazine, which was also done in Adobe Illustrator. We had also created a poster that had documented our process where we provided pictures of our first drafts and sketches.

Looking back at this project, I can’t help but remember the stress! We had come in during our days off and during our lunch breaks to discuss and work on our project. We were very meticulous, down to the smallest details, such as the placement of pull quotes to incorporating the elements of design. I learned a lot of soft skills, from improving my time management skills to working on my communication skills, both written and oral.