Our first project to kick off the academic year and I was eager to get back into the swing of things after a long summer break. Which may have been why I made the rather sadistic decision to take on a cereal box with a cartoon illustration. Looking back, I'm amazed at how much i got done within the 3-week project deadline: not only did i research the appropriate time period, but I designed and made the full-sized prop and designed an entire set in which to place it. My visuals suffered for the lack of time, but i was able to go back and improve on them at a later date, and now I'm very proud of my work on this. Designing the graphic prop was a lot of work as well as it involved illustrating a clown eating cereal creepily, as well as graphic design for all 6 sides of the box. Furthermore, I added in some Chinese text alongside the English ones to make the box look like it was made for a supermarket in Hong Kong. My grasp on the Chinese language is fairly weak, but luckily I had a friend who could help me translate the words I needed. It made me appreciate how much thought goes into properly localizing words for branding. For example, I could not just translate the words directly as the Chinese Language does not have the same concept that "Uncle Bobo" would convey in English, and also clowns are a Western product. Asian culture traditionally does not contain a clown figure in its stories. In addition to all that, coincidentally in Chinese, "Bobo (pronounced something like Bwoh-bwoh)" also means "Uncle", so I had to make the Chinese words on the box say "Uncle Clown's Circus Hoops". I'm very proud of how my choice of fonts made the 2 brand names in both languages look similar even though they were in completely different languages.
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