Invitation design for “a Zine Night market”

For this project, I was asked to create two invitation designs in different styles for an event that would be held by my fictional publishing company, Persuasian Press. I chose “A Zine Night Market” as the title of my event, because of cultural ties to Night Markets found in many Asian cultures.

For the first invitation, the layout had to be symmetrical and centered, using only text, no color, and a Transitional or Didone serif typeface. I chose Didot as my typeface for this phase because of its elegance and contrasting line widths. I wanted the overall shape to look like a hanging lantern found at Night Markets in Asia, and I think I was successful with that. At first, I had too much going on in terms of sizes and arbitrary italics, so I tried to simplify it a bit, while still maintaining a clear hierarchy.

The second invitation was inspired by early 20th century designers. It had to be dynamic, asymmetrical, include color, and use a pre-1930s serif typeface, with the same text from the first layout. This phase was a lot harder for me because after following such strict rules for the first part, I didn’t know what to do with all this freedom. I had this image in my head of zines with the pages facing down looking like the tents at Night Markets, and after adding that illustration, I was inspired a little more about how to arrange the text. I added the dark blue rectangle to make the figures pop out a little more, and because of the “night” aspect of Night Market. I tried to create a sense of movement with the text placement, guiding the eyes to where they should move next.