While Japan does not traditionally celebrate Lunar New Year in the same way as many other Asian countries, the Lunar New Year celebration in Japantown San Jose honors the neighborhood’s history as a once predominantly Chinese community while celebrating the diverse Asian American cultures that live there today. The event embraces both Chinese and Japanese cultural traditions and is designed to be welcoming and inclusive to the broader community.
For this project, I was commissioned to design a logo featured across event posters and Fukubukuro (“lucky bags” or mystery bags), an initiative created to encourage support for local businesses within the community. I also designed a series of informational posters highlighting featured events and their cultural significance, including pinwheels, lion dancers, and firecrackers.
Sumi-e Ink: My final design for the logo was based off traditional Sumi-e ink paintings. I attempted to show brushstrokes by varying lineweight in my vector drawing, later I did an exploration of the idea with actual Sumi-e ink thinking it could be used for the poster, but the event organizer wanted the poster and the screen-print bags to match closely.
The main feedback I got on this design was that the printing was low fidelity and to keep the details to a minimum. In the final printing on the lunch bags, the JBA flower logo on the saddle lost some of its details.
When working with the event organizers, we went through several rounds of designs to figure out what would work best for the festival. This meant lots and lots of horse drawings.
