Assignment 5: Colourful Asia

When I heard that we had to design a postcard depicting a colourful Asia, my first thought went to food, and then to spices - think about it! So many colours, so many flavours and fragrances to choose from! So off I went to my Mum's spice cupboard and got the following spices:

A mix of warm, cooling and neutral colours! Perfect. I set them out in the shape of the map of Asia and added an ornamental woven basket for an oriental touch. As a final touch, I decided to add a slogan 'Taste the colours of Asia' in cursive yet legible font for a slight ethnic touch.

As the resultant appearance was pretty dull, I did the following colour study.

Colour Study
Despite experimenting with the different filters and wild colour combinations, the natural colours were best for the foreground as it is difficult to colour 3D objects in block colours.

For example:

Although the above colour combination is eye-catching and attractive, the map is almost indistinguishible and there is nothing that evocative of Asia here - the psychedelic colours here actually remind of me of the hippie era in the West.

Besides psychedelic colours, I've also tried out using cool colour filters over the original image, which yielded predictably boring results. Do look at the following colour schemes for an overview - the first row involves keeping the foreground image in neutral colours while using contrasting colours for the background; the second row uses cooling colours, while the third row involves outrageous mixing of psychedelic colours:


On the other hand, combining a foreground in natural colours and a background that is either brightly coloured or simply in contrasting colours does have a very nice effect:

Hence, I've chosen the above as my final prototype. Here's the accompanying back side of the postcard. I've chosen to affiliate the design with ASEAN (i.e. for Southeast Asian countries only) because the spices in the image seem to be more relevant to the region. Furthermore, ASEAN is playing an increasingly boundary-spanning role in Asian Politics, so it will not be surprising even if does initiate campaigns, movements, etc that include the whole of Asia as well.