Poster Design
Date
October 17, 2018
Vietnam, It’s the country my parents were born in. A place that was their home until they eventually immigrated to the United States.
At the time, I hadn't yet been able to visit my parent's home country, so I wanted to take this project and use it to learn about Vietnam's capital. Through my research, I learned about all of the popular sites I'd love to visit one day and created a poster that highlighted them in this flat graphic style.
Using the variation of warm tones, I wanted to create a level of depth to guide the user's eye through the different layers towards the horizon. Adding details like the rice paper texture helped pull the design together and give it a nice matte finish that makes you want to reach out and touch the material. Another design element I wanted to add was the pattern of motorbike riders as a small detail in the minimalist environment because the chaos of driving in the city is a unique characteristic that differs from ours.
The entire process was one of discovery. I remember showing the first draft of the poster to my parents, and the immediate critique they had for the flag and name that I had initially used. For them as Vietnamese-Americans, the capital will always be consider Saigon which is the name before the communist took over. I learned that the yellow flag with three red stripes was the South Vietnamese flag, and it represents democracy and freedom to Vietnamese-immigrants like my parents.
Learning all of that, I wanted to make the changes to better represent their critiques and the city that they remember.