i thought work was over 5:30am this morning. it was not. it turns out that they want the poster in traditional chinese. someone misunderstood and passed along the wrong instructions to me -_- one more work-from-home day, this time eating right into my official leave… * * * so i did a quick change. i don’t have many simplified chinese fonts, so the traditional chinese version should look better, right? wrong. it looks uglier. it feels dead. it lacks musicality. a poster for a music event lacking musicality is trash. this says something, two things in fact: specifically, designing with limit resources need not produce worse results; conversely, designing with abundant resources need not produce good results. and, secondly, typeface selection is somehow fundamental to the design and you can’t just change things around without thinking. the last time i noticed the latter i could blame it on other people. this time i can blame no one, because no one else has touched this poster. you can’t just change fonts. changing fonts changes the feel, and you can’t just mindlessly slap some random feel onto something that’s not supposed to be random. and the first? the examples in 日本の1&2色グラフィックス have shown beautifully that limited resources can produce brilliant results. as brosshard has written, how the results look like ultimately depends on the talent of the designer and not your resources. coupled with what i have seen (and tried to reproduce) since i saw koichi sato’s posters, it is obvious that i am inexperienced, untalented, or both. |