Happy Baccarat Promotion
Macau and Hong Kong are bilingual cities. I had worked on English/Spanish and English/French designs before, but working on the account for a casino in Macau was my first foray into English/Mandarin.
I had some familiarity with kanji characters through my Japanese studies. But working on this account challenged everything I thought I knew about fonts, as I worked on print designs that were deployed around both Hong Kong and Mainland China.
For starters, I didn't know anything about the two sets of Chinese characters, Traditional and Simplified. Simplified characters are used in Mainland China, while Traditional is used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and abroad. Switching between the two can change certain characters. If the font for the typeface you're using doesn't have both a Traditional and Simplified version, you'll end up with the wrong or missing characters. Also, Adobe software doesn't package Chinese, Japanese, or Korean fonts, which can become a bit of a hassle.
Linotype has an excellent explanation of Chinese fonts that I'd recommend checking out.
When building out my final mechanicals, I learned to be doubly sure that the correct characters were in the right print files, depending on where they were deploying. Not the most straightforward task when you don't know the language, but I got the hang of quickly recognizing characters after a while. And I thought I'd never have any use for those Japanese lessons in my design career!
As for the design, this summer promotion is a hyper-stylized photo collage. Working with the team's art director and photo retoucher, I sourced a number of stock images and arranged them into this scene. The golden plaque chips were created from scratch in Photoshop using layer styles to achieve a consistent golden sheen on all of them.
