Outdoor sign for Year of the Snake exhibit.

Year of The Snake

A flexible branding system created for a speculative DeYoung museum exhibit celebrating the 2025 lunar new year. I wanted to explore the capabilities of Adobe Firefly for illustration in this assignment. I experimented with prompting and providing sketches as a basis for composition. I found that feeding in basic sketches gave me significant control over the composition of results while not inhibiting the embellishment of the AI generated results.

Brand Identity

Flexible Brand System

Museum Branding

Tools Used

Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
Procreate
Adobe Firefly

Design Philosophy

Inspired by Ming Pottery aesthetics

Objective

Create a flexible branding system for a prospective DeYoung exhibit.

Deliverables

Exhibit poster, ticket, outdoor poster, OOH advertising

Design Process

Moodboard and Concept

My goal was to capture the essence of Lunar New Years. I knew I wanted the imagery of the serpent to be prominent because it would be celebrating the Year of the Snake. I came across imagery of traditional Chinese porcelin. I was struck by the strong contrast of the dark blue on the pale white background and decided to use it as the aesthetic for my project.

Moodboard collage for Lunar New Years Year of the Snake

Design Process

Thumbnails and Sketches

From the moodboard, I moved onto creating thumbnails in my notebook, imagining the composition of a poster for the exhibit. After several concepts, I moved onto simple digital illustrations, to be used as the basis for Adobe Firefly prompting.

Collage of preliminary sketches for Year of the Snake exhibit.

Design Process

Poster Design Iteration

Four iterations of Poster designs for the Lunar New Years exhibit.

Above are the four initial iterations for my exhibit poster design. My primary challenge was to create a compelling visual that also preserved the legibility of the poster text. The posters on the left side used my quick, mockup digital sketches. To create the illustrations on the right, I prompted Adobe Firefly image generator, using my sketches as a base. Below is the final poster design.

Final Exhibit poster design for the Year of the Snake Exhibit.

Design Process

The Final Design System

After finalizing the exhibit poster design, I approached the design of exhibit ticket and OOH advertising. My goal was to create a flexible design system with recognizable design language, expanding on the aesthetic of my poster.

A ticket to the DeYoung museum's Lunar New Year exhibit

The final design for the exhibit ticket.

Horizontal billboard for year of the snake exhibit.

An OOH advertisement for the exhibit.

Outdoor sign for Year of the Snake exhibit.

External signage for the exhibit.

Street banner for Year of the Snake Exhibit.

OOH street banner advertising the exhibit.

Poster advertising for Year of the Snake Exhibit.

OOH Poster advertising the exhibit.

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design@asobl.com
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