Meet the Philly designer behind Instagram’s ‘VOTE’ stickers
A Philadelphia artist's Election Day-themed designs are getting major traction in people's Instagram posts Tuesday.
When Selena Gomez, Joe Biden, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez added the balloon-lettered, pastel “VOTE” sticker to their Instagram stories Tuesday, they, along with an untold number of other social media users, shared the work of Philadelphia artist Fabiola Lara.
Lara has been a freelance designer since 2015, and posting her work on Instagram apparently got the company’s attention. Instagram contacted her in March, asking her to design digital stickers for the election season.
She designed three other stickers for Instagram with an election theme: a rainbow design that says, “Register to Vote”; a heart with “I voted” on it; and a lady in a blue bucket hat with the words “I registered to vote.” All four have been available on Instagram since May and users can pick English or Spanish versions. The Instagram icon for election-related material — a red, white, and blue ballot box — is hers, too.
“As an artist you always want to get your work out there,” Lara, 30, said, “so to collaborate with a brand that has as much influence as Instagram is a pretty big milestone for me.”
Instagram’s official post promoting Lara’s work said the stickers “help Americans express pride — in English or Spanish — when voting in the midterm elections.”
It took almost two months to come up with the design, she said, starting with freehand drawings on an iPad that she then replicated on paper.
“The black outlines on all stickers are hand-drawn, then colored digitally so they have kind of a human element to it,” she said.
The idea, Lara said, was to create something that fit her style, “like a playful and effortless style.”
Lara has been a comics artist and freelance designer since 2015 and has had her work featured in the Los Angeles Times, a U.N. human rights campaign, and Teen Vogue. Her work can vary from the very personal, with comics drawn from her own experiences, to light and funny. She also hosts a podcast, Draws in Spanish, that features conversations with Hispanic artists.
Lara grew up in Florida but landed in Philadelphia in 2020. She came to the United States from Chile when she was 7 months old, and she voted in her first election as a U.S. citizen in the 2018 midterms.
She has tackled political issues in her work before, but “this one was very nonpartisan, though.”
“I just like creating work that brings joy and color into everyday life,” Lara said.