This Lunar New Year or Tết 2019, I had the opportunity to design two separate promotional posters for two charities within the Vietnamese Community to celebrate the incoming new year, Year of the Pig.
The first design is going on my 3rd year in-a-row for the Louisville Vietnamese Community Tết Celebration, which takes place on the 9th of February. Similar to the last two years, the layout is mostly the same, the same overall red and yellow (in the eastern culture, these two colors stand for good luck and fortune) design. The main difference is the zodiac animal in the center of the poster, which is justified as it correlates to this year's respective zodiac, the Pig. Look at how joyous he is! Once again, I incorporated the yellow apricot blossom flowers to the frames in the design. This is a symbolic and very special flower in the Vietnamese culture! The apricot blossom flowers only blooms during Tết as family and friends celebrate our most beloved holiday. Also, shameless promotion, if you'd like to grow your own beautiful apricot blossom tree calligraphy painting, check out an app that I released last year during the 2018 Lunar New Year:
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Next is the first annual Tết promo design for Tu An Temple, a temple that I do a lot of charity work for. They will be ringing in the Lunar New Year at the stroke of midnight on the exact Tết date, on February 4th. Using a similar color scheme of red and yellow, but instead of mainly a red background, I went with Yellow/Golden primary layout. The reason is that Buddhist temples are usually associated with the color gold, as you search the keyword, "Buddhist Temples", on Google Images, you will understand what I am talking about. Also, accidental bonus design points, this design looks VERY similar to the first page of a Lunar year calendar that every Vietnamese family have in their home.
This was pretty much an internal creative conflict of interest. Here I am trying to outdo my own designs promoting two different organization with two completely design with the same objective. Funny how that worked out. In the end, I really did enjoy coming up with the designs for these two posters and especially enjoyed how they looked both on print and digitally. Mind you, I did all of this while on vacation in Vietnam! Feel free to check out my Instagram page as I photo-document my visit in Vietnam and Thailand.
Happy New Year! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!
**EXTRA CREDIT**
With both posters above being printed on Ledger, I was also tasked to create a letter-size version for the Louisville Vietnamese Community for mass print purpose. While it wasn't necessary hard to do, it did take some time to configure the layout because of the ratio differences.
