Postcard: Your Notion of Colourful Asia

For this week, we are supposed to design a postcard that represents our Notion of Colorful Asia. It can be from a cultural/political or even a social perspective. One thing to note is that we were asked to avoid touristy postcards. (Meaning no pictures of sightseeing scenes).

My first conceptualization came from the theme: FOOD

If you look close enough, the postcard design consists of a variety of foods from across Asia. I put in pictures of durians, chilli crab and even sushi! (besides the dim sum picture). Since it is all food related, i decided to name it Taste of Asia and also highlighting the country where the food came from.

I rendered the design in photoshop and added a fuzzy feeling to the background to make the main picture stand out. However, the finished design does look very tourist-y right?

Here is the picture of my color palette.
Final Design:

Back Design:Since i mentioned that my first design is rather tourist-y looking, I decided to design another one. My next theme is rather similar to the first, but its more intuitive: RICE.

Conceptualization is actually coincidental as the idea just came to me while i was having my dinner at night.The staple food of all Asian nations is Rice. So i decided, why not designed my postcard with rice? It was not easy because I first have to place to rice in the form of the letters and they keep running all over the place. The next problem i faced is that of photography. I had a hard time taking a picture that captures the slight details from the rice.

I am quite happy with how the pictures turned out and I continued to design in photoshop, and I used brushes for the oriental houses. I put a pair of chopsticks to signify the "eastern cultures" so the houses are actually rather complementary to the whole design.

Here is the final color palette

And the design which I chose to present in class is a cross between the vintage and original. Gives a very old china kind of feeling.


This is the back design, pretty simple and similar to the dim sum one above.

In the end, after showing both designs to my friends, they unanimously voted for the rice one. So I presented the second design in class.

The comments given were
- Not advisable to use brushes (copyright and issue of originality)
- The Bland one turned out much nicer on printout and the tutor suggested that i could work on it to give it a modern feeling
- For the back, the bowl of rice is too big in comparison to the whole layout
- The words 'energy food' sounded weird

So I heeded most of their advice, actually all, and improved my design. The first oriental house design is by brushes, and the second one, i created a layer above the brushes and drew over them. So they are actually different! Click on them for a better view. And I liked the way the second one turned out because I managed to give it some gradient and depth.


With the main design, I whitened the background and sharpened the rice to give it the modernistic feel.


With the back design, I reduced my bowl size and added a small one in and changed to slogan to 'Asia's staple food'.
So what do you think?

Save, Prevent, Kill...

For this assignment, we were tasked to create a poster with the them 'Save, Prevent, Kill...' Target Audience being the general public as it will be placed at the bus stop and notice boards of busy streets.

I wanted to create a whole new idea based on saving one's self. I came up with a few ideas like how one can save him/herself:

1. Do not Self medicate (If one takes the wrong medicine, the condition will worsen)
2. Go for Regular Check ups (in case one have some unknown illnesses, it can be detected early)
3. Be aware of what you eat (some food may be very high in fat or cholesterol and are not good food)

In the end, I went with the first one due to personal experiences. My family members have the habit of self medicating and I abhor it because most of the times, I do not know what I am suffering from. The medicine does not solve the cause of the problem, but rather the symptoms only.

So I took pictures of the different types of medicine I have at home and put a 'do not do this' sign in yellow. I chose yellow because, it serves more of a precautionary warning rather than a straight forward DO NOT. (RED)

Here it is!


Comments given were:

1. Logos are too big, can scale them smaller
2. The header seems to blend into the background.
3. Must get rid medicine names!!
4. The tagline: Save yourself is not appropriate in this context.

To be honest, I was feeling quite down after all the comments. I've great hopes for this 'new idea' but somehow, I knew that I did not successfully bring it across in my poster. So i acted according to what suggestions they gave, mostly with the approval of Jing.

This is my new poster design, but I still think it can be further improved! Sigh.
Okay, me being me has decided that I will SQUEEZE whatever time I have (it is week 10 and I've got so many impending deadlines and storybook and what nots.) to conceptualize a whole new poster. I basically eat, sleep, drink photoshop for 8 hours non-stop on that fateful day when I made the decision. And I did not regret it one single bit.

I wanted something eye-catching, I want people's heart to wrench when they see this. I will not say I am very successful but to the few viewers of my new made poster, at least I know I made it when i see their expressions.

My idea was along the line of: save the animal, especially your pet from abuse. To me, abuse comes in different forms and it could be negligent or restriction. I chose restriction because it has not been widely adopted by the general public. More than often, we humans tend to force our pets to our own bidding. We push them, we drag them along as we walk, we force them to eat ABC can of food. We slap them if they did something wrong and we do not allow them to behave like an animal. We want them to be who we want them to be.

So the purpose of my poster is to teach the public, especially those ignorant that we should love our pets and not hurt them in the ways that we do. The main focus is 'LOVE' because I feel that as long as the owner loves its pet, problems such as those I mentioned above would be minimal.


Here it goes, MY FINAL ART.

Class Assignment 2

In this in-class assignment, we were asked to pair up with another friend and pick 2 words from a list given to us and draw it using basic elements such as dots and lines. The medium has to be either hand drawn or computer graphic. Since I brought my laptop to school on thursday, my partner, Kenneth, and I decided to just render it in Photoshop.

So here are our 2 masterpieces. Can you guess what it represents?


Kenneth is from DW 5, so he chose to do clutter. Do you feel that the little balls are being squeezed out by the big ones? As for me, since I hail from DW3, I've chosen to do order.

Some how or other, my design turned out to look a bit like an optical illusion where some lines are longer than the other. But i swear they are the same length. And red is so strict a colour it represents order to me.

That's all for this little assignment!