The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2021
AARP The Magazine's Latino American Icons lets Latino artists draw their own heroes
For Hispanic Heritage Month, AARP The Magazine commissioned Latino illustrators from across the Americas to paint a gallery of influential icons.
AARP The Magazine
What it had to solve
AARP The Magazine wanted to mark Hispanic Heritage Month with the influential Latinos of recent American history, from athlete Roberto Clemente to labour activist Dolores Huerta and singer Selena.
How it works
To mark Hispanic Heritage Month, AARP The Magazine created a list of influential Latinos from America's recent history — athlete and humanitarian Roberto Clemente, labour activist Dolores Huerta, singer Selena and others — and then made a deliberate choice about who would picture them.
Instead of one house style or stock portraits, the magazine commissioned top Latino illustrators from the US, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America to create a gallery of portraits of these icons, letting a diaspora community paint its own history makers.
The portraits carried the vibrancy and energy of that diverse community: the point was not just which faces were chosen, but whose hands rendered them and which visual traditions each image brought along.
Why it lands
- Handing the brush to Latino illustrators from many countries makes the tribute structurally diverse, not just nominally diverse in its guest list.
- Portraits by artists from the US, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America let each icon be seen through the visual culture of the community that claims them.
- A gallery of commissioned portraits gives a magazine feature a durable artifact — the images outlive the issue and circulate as the tribute itself.
What it did
The magazine let the community's own artists decide how its icons looked, and the resulting gallery earned a place in the D&AD awards archive under Illustration.
What you can take
When a publication honors a community, let artists from that community draw the heroes: the portraits then carry the energy of the people they represent, not an outsider's gaze.
Since then
The gallery became the face of AARP's tribute for Hispanic Heritage Month and later entered the D&AD awards archive as an Illustration category work. The archive entry records no circulation figures, so the case rests on the commissioning idea itself: the community that is being honored also supplies the hands that honor it.
Sources
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