funny yellow fruit
: the rotten history of the banana trade
an interactive mobile story about the humble banana and its outsized role in labor uprisings, from the tropics to San Francisco, and beyond.
*archival material provided by the Library of Congress & Wikimedia Commons
place-driven narrative
Funny Yellow Fruit was born out of an exploration of the history of San Francisco’s Mission Creek, a neighborhood more recently revamped as a sleek, high-tech enclave.
Before this however, it was a bustling shipping port, home to United Fruit Company’s west coast hub, where their famous banana boats, the Great White Fleet, would arrive from the Caribbean full of the tropical fruit ready to be distributed to families all across America. United Fruit, later known as Chiquita, has a long and storied history of insidious labor practices, both in San Francisco, and abroad.
AI-generated visual language
I used Adobe Firefly to generate a wide range of illustrations that were then manipulated and animated to embed into the mobile page.
Taking visual cues from cheeky, retro fruit advertising, as well as social realist folk painters, the visual iconography mimics the sense of tension between the image of the banana in popular culture and the underbelly of its journey to every breakfast table in America.
