Student Showcase

For my last year of the Holland College my classmates and I had to each design a poster for our local Visual Arts program's Student Showcase. The showcase is meant to show off the work of graduating visual arts students to the public, in the form of photography, large-scale illustrations, and digital displays of 3D works of art. The graphic design program is always tasked with the branding of the event, and for this, the board of visual arts first comes up with a theme and tagline that best suits the year as a whole. Our year was around the time Covid 19 was prominent in our society, so there was a large change in the curriculum as we had to do a lot more work from home.

This being said the board had come up with the title: Paradise Lost & Found. My colleagues and I each had our designs, each displaying a different perspective on what this tagline meant, finally having all the finished posters be voted on by the other students in the visual arts branch of the college. In the end, mine was chosen and I was given the task of cleaning up the design and preparing it for print on both large-scale and small-scale surfaces.

For the design itself, I was fascinated with the visuals from Dumbo's drunken dream sequence, as I felt it was a beautiful take on visualizing the ideas that we as people come up with. I felt that the Paradise that has been lost and found as described in the tagline references our thoughts we're forced to live within all our separate isolated worlds that would keep on growing and growing as time went on. I wanted a chaotic display of visuals that flowed into each other, showing that despite their complex shapes, they all just simply fit together and make up our very selves.

Finally, there was the actual artwork I needed to display for the event itself. Our class was divided into two themes. One side had to do a piece based on things lost, and the other would focus on things found. I was on the "found" side of things. To represent this visual of things found I wanted to portray the feeling I got when playing Breath of The Wild for the first time and I discovered the Dragons for the first time. The feeling of discovering a sense of hope in the world despite it seeming like it's on the verge of crumbling apart. That was the sort of feeling I was trying to convey.