Works of the heART: 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.