Kingsford Postcards
Marketing Concept
This project is a campaign that promotes Kingsford as Sydney’s next up-and-coming foodie hub through the use of postcards that are designed to be informative, inviting, and interactive.
Anzac Parade along Kingsford is home to a vastly multicultural and largely authentic dining scene. This unique food street has the potential to be promoted greatly for both Kingsford’s cultural wealth and economic growth. Local residents can find community gathering spots in these restaurants while local tourists from other suburbs can visit this area for a taste of local cuisine.
The end-users will be food-loving local residents seeking to be more familiar with their community and adventurous young visitors between 20-40 years old from outside Kingsford seeking a more diverse, authentic, and unassuming dining experience in a new place where they can spend their free time. The postcards will promote the increase in the number of visitors at the restaurants featured, and the development of Kingsford’s reputation as foodie hub.
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Process:
Exploration & Iteration
I started my project by creating thumbnails. This allowed me to ideate what kind of content I would want to put in, styles, compositions, and other ideas. This helped me flesh out my concept and let me freely come up with creative ideas without worrying about the execution.
From the thumbnails, I started creating sketches fleshing out my favourite compositions. I started adding detail and noting down what I wanted to do. This is when the idea of adding negative space peeking through elements came in. This is also when I came up with the idea of featuring "rows" in different parts of the postcards to mirror the rows of restaurants featured in Kingsford.
Drafting is when I started seriously illustrating. This helped me determine the style I wanted to go for. I ended up choosing this very sketchy hand-drawn style to mimic the vibe of family-owned homegrown restaurants prominent in Kingsford. This was also a very appealing style that helped the food look as appetising as possible. I knew I wanted to make the food look as good as I could because well, we eat with our eyes first!
When it was time to digitise my drafts, I started playing around with colours. I knew I wanted the colours to look friendly and warm, so I went with yellows and saturated colours. I also started playing with fonts and compositions, creating contrast and text hierarchies. I was unsatisfied with these drafts however because they looked too childish for what I was going for.
I started creating these drafts of what I would like the postcards to look like as a set. Here, I wanted to see how they looked together if I balanced the colour usage properly, and if they looked good together. Since I played around with negative space and colour I wanted to make sure the colour flows well from postcard to postcard.
My favourite part of the process was drawing the food. Again, I set out to make each food as appetising as possible. Realism was not the main concern, just that I wanted it to look like something I would eat. I took care to add elements that I always found appetising in food: the crisp burnt edges of fried eggs, the greasy shine on bacon, and the colourful bright green of pandan, cucumbers, and limes. I wanted the linework to capture these elements too so I could still convey these feelings even without colours.
Once I had my illustrations, I started playing around with composition. I know I didn't want to just do straightforward shots of food. I didn't want it to look like "here’s the food" and go. I wanted to instead create creative and enticing graphics: things that functioned as a menu AND as artwork. I added elements of graphic design to the illustrations like text and shape to achieve this.
My final set of postcards wasere chosen among the drafts because they worked well both individually and together. These four have a great flow and balance to them and I think they balance text, illustration, graphics, colour, and overall composition the best. I like how the colours flow well from one to the next, how they work as a set, and how they stand on their own individually. I hope I did justice to Kingsford but I know I am very happy with the concept and execution of these postcards.
