Poster Project: Happiness Is The Truth
Project Statement:
For this poster project, I create a series of three posters for the organization "Action for Happiness". The overall theme of the posters is "Happiness Is the Truth", with subtitles "Love Sugar", "Enjoy Music" and "Go Travel". Since I want to make my posters simple but powerful and easy to understand, I only use a couple of lines to outline the human figures in order to emphasize the more important and colorful "object" parts. I use the Polaroid style to make the whole design more delicate.
For the first poster, the graphic design shows a short-hair girl eating a lollipop. I use some white lines to roughly sketch the girl, then use dark pink, light pink and white to draw the lollipop. About the second one, I continue to draw the whole body of the girl in a simple style, then focus more on the mint guitar to highlight the subtitle "Enjoy Music". For the third poster, I design the sketch of a flying fairy, then use blue and green to present a world map on a balloon to show that the fairy is travelling around the whole world. After all the work, I add different background colors to the posters, showcase the subtitles in a special font and use a bunch of colorful geometric figures to decorate the posters and make them even more charming.
After the critique session, I realized that I had probably paid too much attention on the aesthetic aspect of this design. I neglected that the practical aspect of these posters is to educate and to call for action. After realizing this point, I changed the bottom texts of the posters into more informative and explanatory phrases, as well as adding the logo of "Action for Happiness" to make the posters more meaningful.
During this project, I find firstly that it seems easy to draw the human figures. However, it turns out to be quite difficult as I need to make sure the drawings are all symmetrical and smooth enough. More importantly, I learned that a good design is much more than making something pretty. The designers should learn to take others' advice constantly because without the basic practicability, a highly aesthetic design still can't be considered as a good design.