Story time!
I’ve always loved to work on personal projects. Let me take you back to a project I worked on in 2017 when I was a wee baby idealist 🤔
Once upon a time, a friend and I had a darn good idea:
We wanted to build a community around great ideas and personal stories.
What the Shell, a play on words on a common cuss phrase, is what we were set on calling it. Because as a pair of two 17-year olds entering their senior year in high school... why the hell not, right?
This was What the Shell's launch poster. We posted it on our website, as well as on our social media pages.
Without putting too much thought into it, we got to work. We created a Facebook page, started an instagram page, and built a website. The rush of excitement we got from executing this vague idea into an actual passion project was our main driving force for the next few months. (Note: I mention how this was a joint passion project, but all the illustrations I feature on here were created by me 😄)
Our idea was simple: We wanted to celebrate the different ideas and thoughts that students our age (15 to 17 year olds) came up with. We wanted to inspire other people to work on their own creative personal projects. We wanted to do this with What the Shell.
Shelby the turtle is empathetic and she loves ideas. She's also the logo for What the Shell (middle).
We made a mascot for What the Shell: Shelby the turtle. We planned on speaking on our site and social media pages through the persona of Shelby. We decided to go with a turtle because we figured that most people loved turtles (also, turtles weren’t difficult to draw 😅).
You’ll know that it's Shelby in an instant when you see her orange body and blue shell with a white lining. She’s an idealistic turtle who frequently ventures out into the world to seek ideas both big and small. Shelby is empathetic and she loves ideas. She’s what makes up What the Shell’s Logo.
The Jargon Comics
Searching for ideas in the big world took a bit of time. While Shelby was in the process of searching for ideas, we came up with some comic strips to share some humor with our audience. The comics were mostly targeted to appeal to other students in our school, such as one about dreading the first day of school, and another about managing the stress during exam weeks.
Jargon Comic: "School"
Jargon Comic: "Exams are Stressful"
The Jargon Thoughts
I remember religiously scribbling down things that people said which resonated with me. I found it fascinating to think about how these seemingly mundane thoughts were like a window that gave you to the ability to peek into an individual's worldview. Itching to share these tidbits we captured from our world, we came up with a way Shelby could share them through the The Jargon Thoughts!
Community Stories
In addition to these small tidbits of ideas, Shelby also found some pretty big ideas from the people she interacted with. From local news events, to the fear of taking the first step, to summer volunteering experiences, and even to the issue of asian fetishization, these ideas were building blocks to the What the Shell community as a patchwork of ideas and opinions that mostly came from the minds of high schoolers. You can read some of them on the website, while some of them are posted on our Facebook page.
While this passion project lasted a few months, our academic workload as high school seniors became too heavy for my friend and I to balance it together with What the Shell. Eventually, we discontinued this project.
Looking back at it a couple of years later, I can't help but smile at how idealistic and impassioned I was as a 17-year old. These were great opportunities for me to develop my creative muscles as I had a reason to produce a creative output for What the Shell on a regular basis.
Note: Even though I worked on What the Shell with a friend, the illustrations and graphics featured on this project were all made by yours truly 😉
To see the rest of the content we produced for What the Shell, you can check out our
Facebook page and our Website (which both hopefully still exist as you're reading this).
