Your notion of colorful Asia…

• Theme focus: …cultural, political and social aspects of Asia
• Form: Postcard (both front & back)
• Size of actual artwork: A6
• Targeted audience: Anyone who you like to introduce your view of Asia to them.
• Color:
– Front: Full color
– Back: Black, white and various shades of gray
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This is kinda tough though. Asia is such a huge continent with a mix of many different cultures, races, language etc etc. How can I convey Asian message in just one small A6 postcard? Granted those few example shown by the lecturer, I feel those are pretty one dimensional. Food, places of attraction, clothes, or tyical national monuments. Is that all we can say about Asia?

I don't want to simply focus on one country of Asia, ie. China/India/Singapore. I want a more dynamic approach, something different, something which everyone hasn't tried in the examples shown. I want my postcard to stand out rather than become just another piece of work by a student.

Eventually, I went for the brave route and chose politics, I guess nobody would wanna touch this topic since it's being perceived as "boring", "unattractive", "uninspiring" etc. But, how am I to convey political scene of Asia?

First of all, I wanna show different parts of Asia - Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western. And using each part of these regions, show a famous political figure. In addtion to that, I will try to select how these political figures differs from one another.

I end up with these people:-

Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore)
Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar)
Bhumibol Adulyadej (Thailand)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (India)
Saddam Hussein (Iraq)
Vladimir Putin (Russia)
Mao Ze Dong (China)
Kim Jong Il (North Korea)

I managed to include different parts of Asia as well as different kind of rulings. Democracy, Dictatorship, Communism and Monarchy

It was a tough choice for China. There's Sun Yat-Sen and Deng Xiao Ping. But I chose Mao Ze Dong cos he has this gigantic portrait of him at Tiananmen Square, which is a tourist attraction. I also took away the Thailand King cos I think he isn't influential and "well known" enough outside of Asia. Using the figures, I arranged them in circle form on my postcard.

Colour Scheme thumbnails

Chosen colour design.. The brown background signifies the huge land mass of the Asia continent, n the green border to signify vegetation.

Backface of postcard

I added "This is Asia" in different languages to show the language diversity. "This is Asia, where you meet everybody" is to let the user know you can meet all sorts of people in Asia - different skin colour, different language, different political views.



Feedbacks received were kinda positive, well at least it generated more interests. Of cos, you can't satisfy everyone with one design. As I've predicted, people were asking for other political figures who are not present on the postcard. But one very crucial comment was my treatment of the figures - contrast, colouring, shading etc etc. They're not consistent, and the pictures of chosen were not uniform too - standing, face front, side profile. All these will have to be consistent. And the words in different languages, are they necessary?

I'll still need to tweak some parts here and there...