Project Brief: Create a series of stationery for a Chinese Opera. Choose among six titles. I then picked Six Generals as it was something different: one of the stories without romance.
Stationeries Needed: an event booklet, poster, tickets, and also a magazine spread.
The main inspiration for this project was the story itself, which is also the essence of Chinese Operas. I managed to dig out an interesting bit of the story, and part of what makes it quite unique.
Six Generals is about Su Qin, the Prime Minister in the story, but it is called, “Six Generals”, who are actually only the side- characters. I found this to be rather ironic.
Full set of stationeries.
I then thought about making something that isn’t “normal”, maybe something different like an upside-down image that goes against the normal alignment and way of placement.
Another element I used is the key point of the story where the Prime Minister unites the six states, so he ‘contains’ the six generals. The idea is then the six generals being right-side up within the upside-down Prime Minister. I admit, it was a bit tough finding the right style and the tone and manner for this ironic theatre.
From the illustration, the style is wavy and without a consistent thickness, so the logotype that I came up with included different thickness to complement the illustration and its quirkiness.
Poster
Magazine Spread
I experimented with colours and ended up with a cream background against red and black. The results came from avoiding the use of the common red-on-black-background combination as the main colour scheme.
Brochure
The brochure is contained within a triangle-shaped packaging, that when opened, the leaflet forms out the number six.
The horse was chosen as the graphic mnemonic because they were a sort of 'characters' who appeared quite often in the play as the six generals are seen riding them throughout.
Thank you for taking the time to look!
