Official website

https://camp-fire.jp/projects/view/136641?fbclid=IwAR0MzLmjYQguIUJF2lNT_uWYPR-JGBelZLCmAtLqBZBZNX2mVfOPPsBxcQE

This is the event's official website, they sell different products such as the stickers that I designed for them, etc.

Client's letter

Module evaluation

Over this module, I think it is really free because we can choose any brief that can be beneficial to our future career. I really enjoyed working on all the briefs in this module, especially on those client briefs, I believe these briefs are very helpful to my future career because I can learn a lot of new things during the exercise so that I can enhance myself to become a good and professional designer.

Generally, I did a lot of briefs were related to the Japanese culture which exactly fit my interest. The most unforgettable brief from this module is the "Sakura Festival in Leeds" as it is one of the biggest events in Leeds in June organized by a group of Japanese students from University of Leeds. I am really happy and glad to work for the organization as this was my first time to work for an organization instead of individual clients. I felt more challenging than working for individual clients because the design has to fit what everyone in the group wants but not only a single individual.
Luckily, all of the members appreciate what I have produced so it made me feel more comfortable. During the brief, I learned a lot of Japanese culture for example what is "Sakura", which I am happy with. I remember at the initial stage of this brief, I had a meeting with the members of the organization to explain my ideas and plan which was found to be really useful in the further development because I could know exactly what the organization wants in an easy way instead of just communicating through the social media. Hence, I think if I have a chance to work for any clients, I prefer having a face to face meeting at the beginning to understand the precise requirements and avoid making any mistakes.

Due to the fact that the weighting of the module is the highest(60credits), therefore, I spent most of my time working on this brief. The time planning and management of this brief I think was quite good because I have enough time to complete this brief. I remember during the first semester, most of our classmates including me were only focused on the COP3 project as it had to be submitted by the Christmas so I was really stressful at that time because I was wondering if I could finish this module by the deadline or not. Luckily, in January, I started to push myself working on this module everyday so I am able to finish this module. I set a target for myself which I need to do at least a blog post and development every day, and it was quite successful so I am really happy with that.

I think the room for improvement is to try more on hand process development because usually I just developed quickly with the hand process and stayed with the digital development. Hence, I really need to do more on the hand process.

Most of the briefs that I did from this module were focused on branding/campaign designs which fit to what I like the most in graphic design, I am sure this is a great chance for me to improve, develop my specific skill in this area so that it can benefit to my future career.

Overall, I really like what I have produced on this brief even though some of the briefs only short and quick briefs but generally everything that I designed was indeed what I wanted to achieve. This module is really helpful to significantly improve ourselves in the design industry. 

Evaluation

This is my last project out of 10 and it is a short brief only so I just spent about a few days to complete everything, I feel really happy that I can create something to celebrate the Japanese anime over the Heisei period, as a huge Japanese anime fans, I really want to say thank you to the Japanese anime industry what they did over the Heisei period which makes my child life or even now become more interesting because if the anime/manga. Hence, I feel happy to use my ability to design something to express my feeling.

I quite like the outcome especially the calligraphy typeface, it fully showed the beauty of kanji(Chinese characters). It was fun to take different things that I did or learned from other modules or briefs and combine and use them into this brief, it is exactly what we want to achieve.

If I have more time, I would like to design more things instead of posters, such as card games because it would be a more interesting way to celebrate the event.

Final designs

Each poster worked quite well and linked to each other, that's exactly what I wanted.

Displaying the poster in Akihabara is the best way to show my design because it is a place where many shops and establishments devoted to anime and manga are now dispersed among the electronic stores in the district. Hence, there are a lot of Japanese anime fans so it is a good way to celebrate with all of them.

Idea development

Due to the fact that this is my quickest brief so simply, I just wanted to keep everything be simple. I planned to mainly target to Japanese residents, for example, displaying the posters in Tokyo city. The kanji(Chinese characters) of Heisei is "平成", while Reiwa is "令和". Therefore, I tried to use it as the starting point.

I tried some typeface to show the characters "平成" and "令和", however, I don't really like them because they look too common. Hence, I looked back to my COP research that what categories I can try to work with traditional Chinese characters, I decided to work with Classical Chinese characters/calligraphy because of the traditional beauty of the calligraphy, it makes the character looks more familiar and more legible. It fully shows the beauty of kanji so I think it will be really good to use on a celebration poster.

I came out with a wonderful Japanese typeface which is "nagayama_kai Regular", it looks similar to
calligraphy because of the brush strokes which is really representative of Japanese culture.

I just use a few colours on the poster (white, black and red) to keep the simple style. Simply, I just added the year to begin of Heisei and the end of the year of Heisei at the middle with the text"anime". While the red circle behind is representing Japan's flag, I made it more like a brush draw instead of perfectly rounded so that it makes a connection to the character"平成". I made the same version of the poster for welcoming Reiwa. Generally, the colour worked really well together, it created a strong contrast to show "平成" and "令和".

Due to the fact that I think this brief is quite similar to the "micro-genre of music" brief that I did in last year as I also did the Japanese anime music, hence, I think both briefs have similar point. I looked at the things that I did from last year and tried to mix them to work together.

I used the characters that I drew before and applied it into the posters so it makes more related to the theme. As I didn't want to make too different to the previous posters so I kept the same structure, however, I tried to work with the black background but it doesn't result good so I just changed to white which is a lot better.

Akihabara

Akihabara (秋葉原), also called Akiba after a former local shrine, is a district in central Tokyo that is famous for its many electronics shops. In more recent years, Akihabara has gained recognition as the centre of Japan's otaku (diehard fan of anime) culture.

Akihabara has been undergoing major redevelopment over the years, including the renovation and expansion of Akihabara Station and the construction of new buildings in its proximity. Among these newly opened buildings were a huge Yodobashi electronics store and the Akihabara Crossfield, a business complex with the aim of promoting Akihabara as a centre for global electronics technology and trade.