In Design class, I created a movie poster that added onto my World Building project, as well as creating a product design project through creating a logo, choosing my products and merch, making mockups, and making a magazine advertisement.
Product Design
I was really excited about this project because I always imagined myself creating a product for fun and then selling it, and this project allowed me to explore the different steps of product design. Through this project, I made my own imaginary Chinese dumpling company. I started off by creating a mood board, which is a collage of inspiration that I found online that I could potentially use for my design. After the mood board, I drew a dumpling and chopsticks graphic with a red rectangle behind it as my logo. Finally, I made my package and magazine page design, where I researched the ingredients used in packaged dumplings, the weight and serving size, and added a tagline.
Artist Statement
When creating a logo and package design for a product, I was met with an overwhelming amount of choices, especially for food, drinks, and hygiene products. Since I value my Chinese culture, I decided to create my own package design of frozen dumplings called Jerry’s Dumplings. I got this inspiration from one of Uncle Roger’s YouTube videos, where his sponsor for the video was MìLà Soup Dumplings. Their packaging design was very aesthetic, not overwhelming with content, which showcased their authenticity. Using this inspiration, I illustrated a dumpling on my package, as well its ingredients so the consumer would clearly know what my product is about right off the bat.
Through my product design journey, I used Adobe Illustrator and the mockup platform called PlaceIt to make my logo and package design come to life. For my logo, I went with a simple square background, along with a dumpling and pair of chopsticks illustration in front. Then for the package, I added a light, topographic background, before adding the dumpling illustration and the package details, such as the ingredients and the weight. Upon finishing, I exported the image and uploaded it to PlaceIt, where I would be able to apply my design onto a bag. A major challenge I faced in this project was to make the package Asian themed and have their design style. If I were to do another product design project on a similar type of product like this, I would explore different font styles and graphics, such as calligraphy and brush textures to give it the Asian feel.
Movie Poster
Making a movie poster was a great supplement to the World Building story I wrote with my group in English. This project reminds me of the narrative creature I created last year for my flash fiction story, as I get to make an art piece in Adobe Illustrator to go along with the stories I write. Like every project, I started off by making a mood board, in order to put all of my inspiration together. After that, I started to make my poster through drawing the environment and the mining town from my story, as well as adding the movie title, ratings, and labels that you would see on actual movie posters. Originally, I wanted to mainly use Photoshop for my poster to aim for a realistic film style poster, but my World Building group in English decided our story was a better fit for an animation genre, and I wanted to be consistent with my poster.
Artist Statement
My poster is based on the story my group created in English class called “No Man’s Land,” a rebellious story that takes place in the California mines during the Gold Rush period. In this story, a corrupt company takes control of the miners in the mining town. Boots, gloves, masks, and reinforced clothing are intentionally scarce and overpriced, forcing many miners into having to worry about going into debt from buying protective clothing, which hinders their escape to freedom. Immigrant workers facing even harsher conditions, being taxed simply for existing and are driven into the outskirts of town. Violence is the company’s preferred tool, using things like strikebreakers, raids, and “accidental” tunnel collapses to keep workers in line. But beneath this oppressive system, a hidden resistance network is slowly growing to destroy the company.
I created my movie poster by making most of the illustrations in Adobe Illustrator, while creating the special cloud and smoke effects in Adobe Photoshop before pasting them to my design. In Illustrator, I used the pen and paint bucket tool to draw the mountains and the corrupted mining town from our story, and added some texture and details from drawing the smaller shapes. In the bottom center of the image, I drew our protagonist and leader of the rebellion Eugene Croy, where I gave him a strong physical appearance with a pickaxe in the back. Then, I downloaded a fog effect Photoshop brush from the internet and drew some fog and smoke effects in Photoshop before pasting them onto my scene, to showcase the cloudy environment in our story to showcase the cold and chaotic environment. Overall, my poster’s warmer color scheme with the gray foggy colors showcased our story’s environment very well, and if there was something I would change, I would add more detail to what’s happening in the background, such as people mining and some people rebelling against the mining company above them.
Wrapping up the World Building unit in Design, I value becoming more familiar with the design process, from picking a color scheme, making a mood board, creating sketches, and then moving onto the final product. I had a fun time especially in the product design project where I could design a food package, and I also enjoyed the movie poster as I could make a visual piece that would add on to my story.