So last week, we were tasked to design a postcard to promote or create awareness of a travel theme and one of the major requirements to we had to meet was that we had to design a touristy postcard with scenery and what not. I had quite a bit of problem trying to come up with a design but I finally decided on focusing on souvenirs from Asia since each country kind of have their own unique flavour, icon, etc. There the elephant from Thailand, paper fan from China, Peranakan slippers from Singapore, Zhao Cai Mao from Japan, hat from Vietnam, painting from the Philippines, sari from India and the mask from Bali. To add a little oomph, I thought of highlighting the problem that most travellers usually face – how to fit the one million things you buy into the luggage?
So, here’s my design/colour exploration:
Colour Exploration
Initially, I was pretty lost about how to go about doing this colour exploration thingy. I had completely no idea how to start on it, so Jing suggested to make use of what we learnt in lecture about whispering colours, speaking colours, yada yada yada. But I had to fill up an A3 sized paper so I thought maybe I should Google some colour palettes and theories to base my colour schemes on and also to fill the empty spaces.
Here’s the list of colour theories which I based my colour explorations on:
- 1st row, left: Random colours
- 1st row, right: Neutral/Pastel colours
- 2nd row, left: Cool colours
- 2nd row, right: Warm colours
- 3rd row, left: Shouting colours
- 3rd row, right: Speaking colours
- 4th row, left: Shocking colours
- 4th row, right: Monocolour
I decided to go with the warm coloured one. I felt that the colours were pretty close to the real things, and the colours blended very well with each other (as in, none of the souvenirs were “fighting” for attention” or standing out too much). Also, warm colours are fiery, representing passion and energy which reflects Asia pretty well.
And here’s the back design:
Back Design
I was lucky because initially, I had already designed this stacked luggage bags but decided to scrape the idea because I was having problems trying to fill them up with souvenirs and it was just going to clutter my entire postcard if I did show the entire row of luggage bags instead of halve it like this one on the back of my postcard.
Critiques from the class:
- The legs should be lowered a bit and we should not be able to see the knees if the luggage cover is actually slanted.
- The eyes of the Balinese mask are white when they are suppose to be see-through holes. This was kind of delibrate. I tested out setting the eyes to a transparent fill so that the sari could be seen through the mask’s eyes but it didn’t make the mask stand out so I decided to just leave it as white.
- As for the tag, “I <3 Asia” seemed a little cliche but I felt that it something that everybody can relate to because it very commonly seen around. Probably going to keep it as it is.
Overall, I’m really happy with my design! Just a few minor changes here and there, and I’m done! Woooooo~!
