Project Requirements
Four-color poster, 12x18". Required to have name of show ("Feast for the Eyes") and necessary information (date, time, location, etc.) displayed in easily-readable form.

Client Name and Description
SCTI Adult Digital Design Class--a group of individuals in their twenties through forties, both male and female, who are currently working on completing their digital design training.

Client's Objective
Primary objective is to spread the awareness of the show in order to entice people to attend. Secondary objective is to spread awareness of themselves and the program that they are enrolled in so that the community will know that they are entering the workforce.

Target Audience
A very broad section of the population--anyone who could possibly be interested in seeing examples of digital art and design created to professional standards. This would include males and females from teenage years on up, anywhere on the spectrum between an artist and a businessperson. These posters will be hung in various areas around the community in order to get the greatest exposure, with emphasis being on locations that supply artists and designers and provide printing services.

How My Solution Works
The purpose of this design was largely to provide the viewer with some interesting eye candy that would make the poster and its message memorable--the information presented is otherwise rather dry, being only the name of the show, the date/time, and location. In an effort to make this eye candy relate to the subject of the poster, it was built using a combination of a food theme (for the "feast") and a graphic-design theme. The Japanese motif was chosen simply because, at the time, I had an overwhelming feeling that Japanese stuff would be cooler to look at, in this case, than the foods of other nations (like Poland, America, Lithuania...). That aspect of it was more of a knee-jerk decision; since this was a rush project, I stuck with it instead of exploring other options. :P

My delight in establishing real borders on only two sides of a picture appears yet again in the large black boxes on the top and bottom of the entire poster. The text blocks inside of them are both justified to the same width, thus creating invisible borders on the remaining two sides. The text itself is colored pale blue (which was pulled from part of the patterned background) so that it would stand out from the black field, but not at so great an intensity that its color would vibrate and irritate the eye of the viewer. The main "A Feast for the Eyes" title was intended to be the first thing seen by passersby; its font was chosen to increase the Oriental feel of the piece. The more detailed info at the top was set in a clean sans serif companion font that would serve to present the information clearly and emphasize the modern feel of the poster that the mechanical Illustrator art creates.

From the main title, the viewer's eye moves upwards along the shape of the lucky cat in the foreground--the overlapping coin and toes link this image to the title, and the coin is eye-catching because no other object in the picture is bright gold. The lucky cat is (from what I've heard) placed near the doors of businesses to beckon in money with its upraised paw; the coin normally reads "one million ryo" (medieval Japanese for "whole lotta money"), but I replaced that with a stylized "SCTI" to symbolize how a business can be prosperous by pulling in and hiring an SCTI student, who will create tons of cash for the company. :)

From the cat, the eye moves into the complex shapes created by the overlapping chopsticks; these serve to support California rolls made of clipping-masked images. (Truth be told, I only used these pictures because of the rush--all of these were left over from my CD Cover project. :P) The kernal of meat in the center of the roll is represented by a clipped eye in every case; I felt that I should put at least a few eyes into the piece to connect it to the "Feast for the Eyes" idea. (Also, they just make a neat visual.) The rice wrapped around the central eyes is composed of spiralling grey text that describes assorted design principles.

Two rows of bento boxes (little cloth-wrapped Japanese lunchboxes ^^) run along the top and bottom of the image itself. In addition to serving as an additional border that keeps the assorted components more contained, each box has a file extension from one of our graphic-design programs written on it. This was just another way of representing additional parcels of data/food in the Feast for the Eyes.

Lastly, the bowl of ramen noodles in the upper left provides additional interesting patterns with the spiralling noodles, which have a layered appearance due to their different shades of grey. Each of these is also a sentance fragment that relates to graphic design (how to use parts of the programs, which programs to use for what purposes, etc.). The noodles being picked up by the chopsticks coil upwards, pointing at the informative text at the top of the poster.

The background chosen for the image was a scan of a round Oriental (actually Tibetan) design based on endless knots, which was colorized to its current pale blue shade. I wanted a pattern in the background so as to create more visual interest (and the pattern had to be at least vaguely Oriental so as to match all the other imagery); the contrast and color were tweaked until they no longer clashed with the foreground components.

Programs Used
Illustrator 9.0.

(Note: This is, without a doubt, the most scarycute thing I've ever designed. I blame it all on my irrational Hello Kitty fanhood. @_@)