Asian Pacific Heritage Month
A heritage month built on strength, not grief
Concept development
Art direction
The short version
My pattern-driven concept, built on boldness, spirit, and triumph, became Coursera's 2021 Asian Pacific Heritage Month campaign.
It launched as anti-Asian hate crimes were rising across the US. Another designer and I each pitched a concept, and mine became the campaign.
I turned the concept into a toolkit that two production designers used to build out a month of content, then creative directed their work and designed a few key pieces myself. The work covered learner stories, community highlights, social, email, and a collection of 22 free courses curated with our Asian Identities ERG. The ERG loved the look enough to adopt it as their year-round identity.
The challenge
Strength, at a hard moment
This campaign launched at a hard moment. Many people in our API community felt fearful, isolated, and unseen.
We wanted to honor that reality without letting it define them.
The brand needed to be present but never take center stage. And the work had to hold together across a lot of pieces: learner stories, employee and instructor highlights, social prompts, blog posts, on-site promos, email, and a course collection.
The idea
From fear to strength
After conversations with our API teammates, we chose to shift the story from fear to strength and celebrate the community's boldness, spirit, and triumphs.
Coursera treated heritage months as a series. Black History Month celebrated Black excellence. Women's History Month celebrated women defining success on their own terms.
The one feeling we wanted people to come away with was solidarity and strength. API members of our community should feel seen, heard, and appreciated. Everyone else should come away with real connection and cultural appreciation.
RESEARCH
Not a monolith
The biggest risk was flattening dozens of cultures into one look.
I set a rule early: every visual choice had to reflect the range of the diaspora, not a single version of it.
Research
I studied how contemporary Asian artists use bold color, pattern, and collage to honor their heritage. I also spent an afternoon at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, looking at motifs, crafts, and artifacts from many cultures.
Color and pattern
A bright, varied palette for the campaign’s joyful tone, paired with traditional textile and craft patterns from across the diaspora.
Symbols
For each pillar, I sourced culturally meaningful symbols from different traditions. For example, a tiger for courage in Chinese culture, and a banyan leaf for longevity in Indian culture.
THE TOOLKIT
A toolkit, not a stack of files
There were dozens of assets due over about five weeks. I couldn't design them all myself, and I didn't need to.
Once the concept was approved, I built a toolkit for our production designers, Daisy and Rob, that showed how to apply the palette, patterns, pillar symbols, and portrait framing across every format we needed.
Daisy built most of the campaign from it, and Rob built the Courserian highlights. I reviewed each piece, gave feedback until it was right, and designed a few key assets myself, like the email feature. Working this way kept a month of content feeling like one campaign and let us ship on time.
Who’s involved:
Concept and creative direction (me), two production designers, a copywriter, our social lead, and our Asian Identities ERG
THE WORK
A month of content from one system
The toolkit carried five kinds of content.
KICKOFF
Three pillars, introduced
A launch post introducing the three pillars.
LEARNER STORIES
Portraits built from each learner's heritage
Each portrait was built around symbols from that learner's own heritage. For example, peaches for happiness and prosperity in Korean culture, and lotuses for enlightenment in Indian culture. Drawing on the tessellating patterns and haloed figures in Asian art, I framed each learner to feel heroic and honored.
COMMUNITY
A bolder color system for Courserians
A bolder color system for six Courserians and our instructors, so their portraits read differently from the learner stories.
COURSE COLLECTION
A tapestry of patterns
A "tapestry" of patterns standing for the range of courses and cultures in the collection, carried across promo units, the landing page, email, and social.
SOCIAL
Prompts the team could post all month
With our copywriter and social lead, I developed prompts like "How do you demonstrate boldness?" I designed a background set for each pillar so the social team could post all month without more design support.
The result
The ERG made it their identity
We worked closely with our Asian Identities ERG throughout the campaign. They loved the look and feel so much that they asked to adopt it as their own identity.
I designed a new ERG logo, Zoom backgrounds, and self-serve templates for presentations and events, so the work kept going long after May, in the ERG's programming all year.
What I learned
Listen first
The concept came from conversations with the people it was for. The ERG’s involvement made the work better and gave it a life beyond the campaign.
Specificity is respect
Researching the meaning behind each symbol took longer, but it’s what made people feel the portraits were really about them.
A good toolkit scales you
Putting the thinking into a playbook let two production designers build most of the campaign, let the social team post all month, and let the ERG carry the look forward, all without me being the bottleneck.
