Preserve Your Roots — Chinese
Advertising brief by LASALLE College of the Arts, BA(Hons) Design Communication
Following the brief on Designing for Language Preservation, Preserve Your Roots is an advertising brief that tasked students to create a print campaign for a (similar) target audience of our choice.
Brief requirements:
– Print Campaign is in high resolution print (300 dpi) – Sharp and clear
– Print Ad size: 180mm (W) x 240mm (H) – Portrait format
– Individual headline for each visual idea
– Support copy for both Print Ads
– 1 tagline for both Print Ads
– Logo (high resolution) must be on both print Ads, tagline to tag either beside the logo
or under the logo
As the custodian of Singapore’s heritage, National Heritage Board is responsible for telling the Singapore story, sharing the Singaporean experience and imparting the Singapore spirit. Using NHB as the organisation for the campaign, these advertisements were designed to put across a concept of how current and younger generations fail to see the importance and meaning behind the Chinese culture. They begin to lose touch with their mother tongue’s culture, and view them solely as decorations for their houses, offices and shops.
Tagline for campaign:
“Chinese is not just a decoration.”
Even the orientation matters
“When the character is turned upside down, it becomes a play of words fú dào le to imply luck or fortune has arrived.”
For the second ad, the character fú was chosen to highlight the usage and meaning behind it during certain Chinese festivals. Thus which, goes back to the point of it not just being used for decorative purposes.
As black was (and still is) the main colour of inks used in calligraphy, the use of black and white added a modern yet minimalistic touch, strengthening the ad series' message.
Every stroke counts
“Some characters may look very similar, but in Chinese, adding a single strong results in a totally different meaning or even nothing at all.”
Back in the past, calligraphy was used as their form of writing. I decided to adopt that into my advertisements to reproduce the nostalgia and rich culture of Chinese language. The usage of calligraphy paper as the background made it more realistic by emphasising further on this point.
