Valentine Design Co is named after my birthday, Valentine’s Day, and nods to one of the driving forces in my life and work:
love.
“Love is ‘the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.’”
-bell hooks.
The “co” in Valentine Design Co represents the prefix “co” (with : together : joint : jointly coexist)
-definition by Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Valentine Design Co is all about connecting and coming together to nurture mutual growth.
Hi!
I’m S
(they/she)
How Valentine Design Co came to be
I grew up constantly playing outside, and drawing in my sketchbook. Later I found myself studying illustration in college, because I wanted to use art as a means of more deeply connecting with myself and the world around me.
Fast -forward about a decade, and I had journeyed through a few design career niches, and found myself faced with a fork in the road during the pandemic.
I created Valentine Design Co to bring connection back into my art and design practice.
Within my work now, I have the privilege to choose to work with values-aligned clients as we collaborate on our mutual growth. I also have the gift of being able to develop intuitive art-making programs for my local community, and to continue to work part-time with a local farm-to-table business.
Working with Valentine Design Co
My specialty lies in creating visual brand packages for you and facilitating your creative, expressive sessions.
My mission is to help you in your movement toward expressing yourself as your most connected self — whether that is in your brand, or in your personal or spiritual experience. I believe that your unique power and presence is already inherently within you just like a seed, sometimes it just takes a grower’s eye and time to help facilitate the growth.
Values + Positionality-
Creation, destruction, expression, diversity, curiosity, joy, abolition, softness, slowness, sovereignty, respect, sensitivity, liberation, nature, connectedness, humanity, mutual aid, freedom, anarchy, anti-imperialism, solarpunk futurism.
While navigating the realities of the society I & we live in in the “USA”, and the imperfections, grey areas and contradictions inherent to my experience as a human from my particular background, I attempt to work toward divesting from the structures of colonialism, ableism, the patriarchy, classism, capitalism, white supremacy, and other oppressive systems.
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While acknowledging that it’s impossible to fully encapsulate all complexity and implications in a list of words and phrases, here’s a general list of my positionalities that I hope helps myself and others in navigating our inner and outer worlds, with guidance from our values. I don’t think that identity politics are the end-goal, but I think that analysis of spaces that are occupied can help in working toward liberation.
In the space and time of the US in the 2020s, I generally occupy locations of:
White | Middle Class with access to resources for financial security | Fitting euro-centric beauty standards; sometimes fitting external cis-centric expectations | College-educated | Physically non-disabled | Non-immigrant; non-indigenous | Young | Neurodivergent; with an upbringing of low accommodation and high masking | Gender non-conforming | Having lived experiences of misogyny | Queer
I aim to be aware of the power I am afforded via the various spaces of privilege that I occupy and use this to guide decisions I make in my life + work as I orient myself toward our collective liberation. I aim to work with individuals and communities that have a similar goal. Additionally, I acknowledge that my specific positionalities likely influence/create certain biases or assumptions that may show up in the way I work and navigate the world.
In navigating my inner world, the world around me, and the intertwining of each, I am finding it productive to write about my experience and values, for myself and others to use as reference points in the process of our ever-growing-and-evolving world-building.