VC1 | poster design final

Task: To conceptualize and create a poster that’s appropriate for the Singapore Design Week 2019.

Your poster should include the following:

  • Singapore Design Week 2019;
  • A Slogan (of no more than five words) that captures and reflects the aims of the event.
  • 04-17 March 2019
  • Singapore Design Week champions design thought leadership by bringing the design, business, and public policy worlds together to answer how they can intersect better to bring about needed innovation and solutions to build businesses, engage communities and enrich people’s lives. Save the date!

This is the look of it after being printed and filtered by apps .

Concept: Design Playground

For my Singapore Design Week theme, I wanted to show that design and creativity is fun, playful and colourful. I decided to use a water playground, as playground shows the fun and playful element. By using water playground, I am able to show colourful as there are splashing going on, and it’s pretty similar to the colour run concept, when you go in clean and out filled with colours. I wanted to show that there’s no limit to how creative one can get, and if you’re in the water playground, you can keep hanging around there!

Slogan: Slidin’ with Creativity

I came up with this slogan to play around with the words of “working” with creativity. But instead of “working”, it’s to slide with creativity, as my work has many slides.

My concept is that the aim of Singapore Design week is to showcase designers and the endless boundary of creativity, there’s no limit to how creative one can get, and creativity is all about being fun and playful! This slogan helps to strengthen my concept as what my slogan means that at this water playground, you will slide with creativity, and the slides you take will eventually lead you to the common pool, where it’s filled with creativity juices / elements. It also enhances the point that creativity and design make life more fun for designers and audience!

We all need a little creativity and design in our life to brighten up our lives!
Read here on my design process and explorations!

VC1 | poster design brainfarts

VC1 | poster design explorations

Reflection on Assignment 2:

I never expected so much thought to be put into doing up a poster design, and that as a designer, there are so much more underlying meaning to everything we do, more than what the audience actually depicts. With the meanings we want to show to the audience, we try to make it into a creative, fun and visually engaging artwork. I think that I managed to hit that! However, I think doing up such an illustrative artwork was probably a risk I took, as I am not very well-skilled at illustrations and I was very afraid of it. There are still much more room for improvement for my illustration, and I need to pay a lot more attention to details, especially for artworks as complex as the one I did up. Doing up an illustration, there were many things I had to consider of, and one important one was perspective. I wanted to show a 3D water playground on a 2D platform, and perspective was very important which sometimes I overlooked. But from that, I learnt more about Illustrator functions and how it’s able to help my perspective issues!

Feedback I got from Michael was that my slogan doesn’t really pop up due to the colours I’ve used, and it seems to be fighting with attention with the rest of the elements. There can also be more breathing space for the graphics part, and for the body text, it’s a little too tight on space, compared to the rest of the part. The slides were also a little too big and can afford to be smaller. With that, I tried changing my slogan’s words all into one colour and I think it really stands out more!

Overall, I enjoyed doing this assignment and I’m glad I took the risk of doing an illustrative poster!

Till then,
Flazéda!
jamz
x

VC1 | poster design explorations

Design Explorations

As concept 3 was the weakest concept I have, I chose to further work and digitalize on concept 1 & 2, and came up with these.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Concept 1 (Left), I used slides, to show the fluid movement of design and creativity and to show that it is fun and playful. I also tried to put the title “SDW” inside, by having the slide as S, pool as D and the deck chairs as W.

For Concept 2 (Right), I wanted to use the architecture of Singapore to talk about the advancement of design in Singapore, and to use the neon effect to show futurism.

feedback:

The humans in concept 1 looks pretty weird as they are all the same and very robotic (hahaha) but it was just a mini draft I did up to show that there will be humans in there!

I should play out more, make it more playful and interesting, and add more colours. As there’s only one slide now, it seems finite instead of endless. If I want to use letters, maybe I should make them into floats.

Concept 2 is definitely a no go and I should just focus on concept 1.

From these feedback, I went back and started drafting a few more layouts for Concept 1.

I decided to focus and digitalize the left sketch as my final as I think that there it shows more creative elements and “fun” due to it being seen as a water playground.

I did it up with stroke on Illustrator first, without adding in colours for the elements.

Next up, I added colours into the elements and started playing around with the fonts.

draft 1

draft 2

draft 3

draft 4

Amongst all, I preferred Draft 1 and showed it to the class.

Feedback (for draft 1):

Slogan and Singapore Design Week seems to be fighting with each other as they are of same size. Body text can be smaller for breathing space. Can shrink down to lock the space. Can have a greater affinity with creativity, add more creative elements as now there’s too much summer parts. – maybe diving / water splashing / paint.

Can emerge colourful after sliding?

Can have a common pool, as a gathering point where people converge? Pool can be colourful? Shift location of slogan to form it in the pool, can have some humans holding the words. Bring in some of the play.

Design Refinement

From the feedback, I tried to incorporate and add in the comments mentioned by everyone.

I came up with a rough draft.

I think the humans holding the boards showing the dates and Singapore design week worked really well, but the pool seems abit weird and messy due to the colours.

I tweaked it around and changed it having a blue pool, and when the humans jump in, there’s extra colours (to show them bringing creativity into the pool)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Initially, I was thinking if I should go ahead with a pale blue background or yellow background, but I think that the yellow background shows more contrast!

I presented the following to the class:

feedback:

Many preferred the one with the purple slide sliding the words Singapore Design Week. Watch out for the body text, can afford to be smaller, and it’s not as readable now, can be cleaner. There’s too many humans, can cut down for breathing space. Currently very cluttered. As I had orange slides for some and yellow slides, many agreed that yellow slide is better. Can shrink down to 80% of the current artwork, focus more on the main areas. There’s perspective issues for the purple slide, need to work on that. Can shift the placement of the slogan in the pool to make it more fun.

With all the feedback I’ve got, I edited it and am done with my final artwork!

Stay tuned for the next post to see my final work!

Till then,
Flazéda!
jamz
x

VC1 | poster design brainfarts

The Brief: Singapore’s design landscape is evolving. Over the past decades, the types of design practices have expanded and contributed to Singapore’s economy and nation development. The DesignSingapore Council and was set up in 2003 to support and grow the bubbling design sectors. To further celebrate the imagination of design practices, the Singapore Design Week was launched in 2013.

Task: To conceptualize and create a poster that’s appropriate for the Singapore Design Week 2019.

Your poster should include the following:

  • Singapore Design Week 2019;
  • A Slogan (of no more than five words) that captures and reflects the aims of the event.
  • 04-17 March 2019
  • Singapore Design Week champions design thought leadership by bringing the design, business, and public policy worlds together to answer how they can intersect better to bring about needed innovation and solutions to build businesses, engage communities and enrich people’s lives. Save the date!

Preliminary Design

I first drafted out a mind-map and some ideas upon receiving the project brief.

However, I felt that it was too simple and too little information, and I went to work more in-depth on it! I then came up with more detailed ones.

While doing the mind map, I kept my mind and thoughts games, penning down everything I thought of and researched on regarding Singapore Design Week.

But, there was a thought that kept popping up in my mind

does creativity ends? is there a limit to creativity?

And I decided to target on that question I asked myself, as I’m sure that many people ask / think that way too.

From my mind map, I came up with three concepts

I started working more on each individual concept to see what ideas / thoughts I want to direct each concept to.

concept 1 : design playground

This concept is mostly targeted to question of having an end on creativity, and if creative boundaries can be pushed. I feel that this is very relevant to Singapore Design Week as every year, designers try to innovate and come up with fresh and creative concepts. But the audience does not really know the tough times behind the design they see.
Coming up with concepts and executing is not as easy as it seems. We need to constantly update and inspire ourselves to ensure that our creative minds are always working!!

Therefore, having the Singapore Design Week is a way for designers to work to push their creative boundaries to greater height – for their personal value, and also to help Singapore move up the ladder of being a design hub.

I wanted this to be more of an illustrative style and incorporating “SDW” the text if possible, but not in a direct manner.

concept 1 – moodboard

concept 2: design community’s future

This concept is targeted towards the design community and working together for Singapore’s future. It’s a lot on evolving, technological advancement, development and planning.

As it’s related to future, I wanted to work on a theme that is more futuristic – neons / cyberpunk / sci-fi kind of look.

concept 2 – moodboard

concept 3: loveable city

This concept focuses more on societal benefits and the public community of Singapore. Design is used as a movement to express thoughts freely and help with social issues. I want to focus on how design can help enrich people’s lives and gives them an emotional connection.

HOWEVER, I’m having a creative block with execution on this concept and what I have is pretty bad now, but I’m working on it!!!

CONCEPT 3 – MOODBOARD

All these are just a basic summary of my ideas / thoughts and I will proceed to talk about my final concept soon!

Till then,
Flazéda!
jamz
x

VC1 | mobile of hope final

Task: To develop graphic forms that convey the notion of hope.The graphics created will be assembled into a hanging mobile for application in a healthcare environment to lighten the atmosphere of the hospital.

Concept: Hope to me symbolizes a dream. I remember hoping for many things when I was young, such as being a Disney princess or be able to fly and etc, and that was the naïve fun young times!

To lighten up the serious and sad mood at the hospital, I wanted my mobile to be more lighthearted and remind them of younger days where we feel that anything could happen, and a magical place where its trouble free! Therefore I aligned my mobile along the theme of “where all magical things happens”

For each graphic form I’ve done up, there is a quote behind it.

  1. Castle on the Cloud
  2. Reaching for the Star
  3. Soaring into the skies

These are all hopeful quotes which I want to bring across my mobile, and I think it did! Here’s the graphic forms I’ve used in digital copy

This is the look of the final mobile! It looks way way way better than the previous one hahaha

     

Animated GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

I shifted the placement of each wizard a little, to show them flying around the castle in different directions.

Catch it being hung up at the ADM Library too!

Animated GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Read Here for my design process!

VC 1 | Mobile of Hope – Process

Reflection on Assignment 1

I think this assignment was more of us trying to thing in graphic forms that’s not very illustrative, to prep us more for logo and branding design. I actually think the toughest part was co-ordinating the colours as it’s hard to keep colours consistent yet showing contrast. I also had a pretty tough time finalizing the graphic forms I want to use, and to make sure that it blended well together, while keeping in mind the positive and negative space. Overall, I had a pretty fun time doing this project!

Till then,
Flazéda!
jamz
x

VC1 | mobile of hope process

The Brief: Hospital can be a stressful environment. What roles can graphic artist and designer play to create a welcoming and soothing environment that can potentially promote healing?

Task: To develop graphic forms that convey the notion of hope. The graphics created will be assembled into a hanging mobile for application in a healthcare environment to lighten the atmosphere of the hospital.

Brainstorming and Preliminary Ideas

I’ve mind-mapped down my definition of hope in this picture below!

The 3 themes I’ve decided to come up with was:

  1. Castle / Fairyland
  2. Representation of Hope through flowers
  3. Representation of Hope through religious architecture

To me, hope was something that I dream of and envision it to be true. With that, I’ll try to think of ways to make it come true.

As the mobile was for a hospital environment, I wanted it to be something lighthearted and not serious, as I feel that the hospital itself has negative connotations to it. Thus I decided to narrow down to the theme of fairyland. It has a magical and positive feel to it, so that when patients see the mobile, it cheers them up because it reminds them of happier and younger days!

The theme revolves around the song Castle on the Cloud, from Les Miserables. The song was about a young girl Cosette, whom hopes to live in the castle on the cloud, where it’s all happiness and trouble free. With that, I went to come up with some graphics that you will see, once you stepped into the castle.

Design Development

I proceeded on to work on the graphic forms digitally and came up with a few forms.

I searched for magical / mythical elements which can help me to further explain Hope. These are the elements I’ve used:

  1. Dragon + Unicorns + Stars
  2. Elf + Pixie
  3. Genie + Lamp
  4. Castle + Clouds

Upon showing it to the class, many agreed that forms 1 & 3 don’t really work out, and form 4 was the best amongst all. From there, I worked further into exploring form 4 and to come up with forms that gives off a similar vibe and style to it!

Next, I came up with another set of graphic forms and consulted Michael via email to ask for his opinion about it!

For these 4, the elements I used are:

  1. Castle + Clouds + Rainbows (as windows) + Girl at the door welcoming visitors
  2. Pixie + Rabbit (at wings) + Girl’s upper body (as face mask)
  3. Flying Wizard + Cat at cape + Catching a star
  4. Unicorn + Dragon + Girl as mask

The feedback I got from Michael was that form 1 & 3 worked better than the rest! And all forms showed consistency in theme except for form 4, and form 4’s negative and positive play wasn’t as well shown as the rest.

The presence of the girl in every graphic form was questioned as well.

With that, I tried to create more graphic forms for individual consultation the following week regarding colour play!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I added 3 more graphic forms from the 4 I had prior to consultation.

The 3 I added are:

  1. Butterfly + Girl
  2. 2 flipped mermaids with the tails joining together
  3. Pixie grabbing a star from a crescent moon
Colour Scheme

I decided to go with pastel colours as it suits the theme that I was going for – young, magical, mythical and fairyland-ish!

From the consultation I had with Michael, I realized that I don’t actually need to have that many graphic forms and could’ve easily settled with 2, as there are more than 2 graphic forms in my final form (hahaha lol)

So from there, I decided to cut down to 3 final forms, and tweak them a little more.

I settled on these 3:

  1. Castle on Clouds
  2. Elf Picking out the star from the Moon
  3. Wizard Soaring into the sky with his Cat

Each final graphic form, I came up with a few variations!

Form 1:

I contemplated on the usage of rainbows for the castle’s windows or crescent moons. I felt that by using the rainbows it will add more mess to the current elements and the moon showed consistency.

My conclusion was to use the moon in the end!

Form 2:

I used 2 different stars one with just a star, and the other with a star inside the star. Feedback I got was that either or seems fine, but there might be too many stars right now! & the girl is very redundant.

So my conclusion was to remove some stars and remove the girl cos she wasn’t really needed to show consistency.

Form 3:

The main difference was the broom, one of thicker strokes and one of lesser! Feedback I got was that the broom seems to not show the flying movement, and in general the graphic form seems to show a static movement instead of intended – the flying wizard. Also the cat can be more incorporated into the cape!

Therefore, I concluded to use the broom with thicker strokes and try to show more flying movement of the wizard.

Final Draft

After making the changes, I added in colours and tweaked the colours around so that there’s differences in the forms.

I planned to hang my mobile with reference from this image below!

       

4 vertical lines were hung (to form an X) and there was a longer string in the middle of the X, which only hung the castle. For each vertical line, I used the same colour scheme (of 3 colours) along the same side of the form! I used quite a lot of colours as I think it suited my theme as people will associate it to being colourful and bright!

Here’s the colours and forms I used in digital copy!

I believe the wizard flying was my strongest form that shows the positive and negative as the cat was really incorporated pretty well!

I placed the forms in alternatives (Wizard > Elf or Elf > Wizard) at the 4 vertical lines. The castle which was hung in the middle was bigger than the rest. It was to show that the castle is the main element of this project, as all the other elements exist within the castle.

I placed the castle at the lowest point, without any other forms blocking it.

     

Animated GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

But due to my very bad worksmanship, it turned out pretty bad! I didn’t know how to cut the forms out from the paper properly as I used scissors, but was then introduced by the class to X-acto knife!! The top was also pretty badly done as I didn’t buy a circle ring and used wire to form it instead.

I also felt that the forms I originally printed were a little too huge and should probably be smaller. Also, comments I got was one of the sides were black and black was totally misplaced with the rest of the pastel elements. The elements hung on the mobile didn’t move naturally as there were too much weight for the fishing line!

Overall, the bad worksmanship made the whole mobile look bad, and its tough to look at the graphic forms with all the mess.

But thankfully I was given the chance to redo the mobile!

After redo-ing, comments given by my classmates were that the workmanship was actually way better and they can focus on the graphic forms instead of the bad cutting 😡

I also edited my final graphic forms colors to show more consistency amongst all the forms, and switched up the black!

Next, I will be posting my final forms and mobile!

Till then,
Flazéda!
jamz
x