Chinese New Year at the Library 2013 Marketing Design

A horizontal 11x8.5 inch sign design set the stage for the following design pieces.

Quarter page handbills were printed 4-up to an 8.5x11 inch
page then trimmed by hand to allow a white border on all sides.

The Chinese New Year 2013 celebration is upon us and our Headquarters Library youth services department will host an event that will include a variety of entertaining activities for those who attend. To help publicize the event, they requested four print and online collaterals:

200 Handbills
8 8.5x11 inch signs
1 Web banner / webslide
1 Magazine print ad

Instead of focusing on depicting each and every one of the activities that would take place at the event, I chose one so the visual image could be larger and have more impact. I was interested to use a piece of black and white vector clip art I'd had for a couple of years of two children waving traditional decorations in the air. I thought the stencil-like quality of the art would make for a perfect shadow puppet that could throw a larger shadowy version of itself onto the background. 

Due to the vertical dimension of the magazine print ad,
text from the curtain had to be repositioned under
the illustration elements, but it worked out fine.

So I changed the colour of the stencil to red to pick up the colour of a domain free "theater curtain" image, then duplicated the stencil element and skewed it a little to emulate a shadow being thrown on a background "screen" surface. I realized that I needed some "sticks" to hold up the stencil puppets, so after a little investigation I saw that some sticks are topped with a little ball at the end which then hold the puppets. I modified and imported some domain free wood textures into the sticks and ball tops, and used another wood surface texture to become the edge of the theater window. This window edge provided the opportunity to run shadows of the sticks up it then terminate at the top edge, then resume again at different horizontal locations to continue the upward climb on the back surface to the puppet shadow. The back surface was shaded to create a light source "hot spot" to further impart the effect of the shadow puppet experience.

The home page website banner art left focused on the art and left
additional information for the caption that would appear underneath.

Although I sourced for what I consider to be the commonly overused, stereotypical, decorative fonts used on many Chinese take-out menus and the like, in the end I preferred a more playful, less hokey font. An originally lengthy descriptive event text was paired back to enable the text point size to be enlarged for better reading visibility, and lastly, the essential time/date/place and corporate logo were all added in areas that were complimentary to the different dimensions of each collateral piece.

I was really pleased with the colour palette and especially with the amount of open space allowed to remain for the image presentation.