Dinner and Debate Graphic

As all of the politically charged among you should be aware, the Presidential Debates begin this Wednesday. I’ve been planning on throwing a dinner party for a special Japanese style 3-course meal at my place for a while now and I’m definitely going to be watching the debate so I figured, why not make a get together out of it? And thus, I became inspired to create this yesterday:

hai hai hai hai hai 8)

As a designer, I’ve learned that whenever you feel the creative juices flowing, you go with the flow. So I did. I knew I wanted to include some kanji and a date so I settled on a postcard layout and went from there. Working from an actual photo of the living space in my apartment, I drew a quick mockup using my Bamboo wacom pad.  From there my thought process was to combine several different elements to effectively make the design a little strange, as certain Japanese art tends to be sometimes. There’s a bit of everything in here, from watercolor brush work to quasi-architectural precision of the TV stand to the stylized, American cartoon treatment of the TV image and free flowing illustrative line work of the people and clock. The kanji on the right literally translates to “meal debate”and the food on the table to somewhat relative to the entrée that will be served at the event.

In the deep end of the pool, I made an incredibly conscious effort to be mindful of America when choosing the skintones for the people. Skintones are always tricky in design because in real life, people have several different shades of several different colors within their faces. Initially I had chosen stereotypical colors like yellow, red, purple, blue, etc. When I looked back at that though, I felt like I was dodging the issue. I eventually decided to use the built in skintones palette and pick a selection of light to dark tones. In my opinion, America is not white, black and hispanic. America isn’t any particular set of X, Y, and Z races. In fact, I’d be willing to say that out of all the countries in the world, America is one of the most diverse. So I wanted to make sure that I at least made a more mature effort than evoking the tired and inaccurate “colors of the world” approach to represent that.

At any rate, it was nice to just design something for myself since I haven’t in quite a while. I don’t think it’s my best work by a long shot but it was really fun and that’s what counts 8)