ROLE: Co-founder/Contributor
A designer, a developer, and a lawyer walk into a bar… and decide to create a Miami centered satirical publication inspired by The Onion. I designed The Plantin's identity and continue to contribute photoshopped images for select articles and manage design/updates of the core website.
Occasionally, I do web design for article connected websites and print collateral, such as zine’s and stickers, for events. As the Plantain grows it’s become a community project built on submissions from the public.
One day, my lawyer (and aspiring writer) friend, Justin, posted a short story on Facebook joking that Marco Rubio would sell hoverboards in Miami Beach after leaving the presidential race. The traction on this post led me, Justin and, tech co-founder, Dainel, to create theplantain.com. Within the first month we had over 100K visitors to the website and mentions in the press from the Miami Herald, The Sun Sentinel, and The Miami New Times. Our social media following also quickly grew to 14K collectively.
The Plantain articles take real life situations and make them so absurd that it gets a conversation started or gets readers to think about things in a different way. Although, many comments on The Plantain’s social posts show that some readers take the article contents as fact. And, on occasion, even big media outlets have reported The Plantain articles as fact. Like when radio station Y-100 announced that Miami-Dade had given up on trying to stop texting while driving by installing a bumper lane. It creates great discourse and, eventually, all readers realize it’s satire.
All articles need an eye catching image. In the beginning, I was the sole image contributor but now images also come from community submissions. Here is a collection of images I photoshopped for Plantain articles.
