Celebrating Chinese animation
The Modern Chinese Animation film festival is a conceptual project whose purpose was to develop an identity for a fictional film festival being held at The Art Theatre in Long Beach, CA.
The festival celebrates the boom in Chinese animation that began in 2015. The dates for the festival were chosen to be the weekend before the 2024 Mid-Autumn Festival.
Conveying movement
Since the goal was to promote a film festival focused on animation, it was important to convey a sense of movement with the design. Therefore I drew on my understanding of animation and incorporated silhouettes and keyframes.
This resulted in the use of a silhouette of Sun Wukong, a monkey from a 16th Chinese fantasy novel, as he does a flip through the air. Sun Wukong was chosen because the opening two films of the festival are adaptations of the novel.
Supporting the seal and calligraphy
Since the seal logo and the presence of Chinese calligraphy draw the eye due to their unique shape and dynamic forms, I chose Gibson Book as a secondary typeface for balance. As a humanist sans-serif, Gibson contains subtle calligraphic elements that support the brush calligraphy of Chinese characters.
