Vivot.com is an e-commerce company whose main competitor is Suning. The Fake Clients brief states that the advertisement to be designed should be similar to Suning’s. It’s always good to have a model to start from. I opened up the Suning site and discovered it was all in Chinese! What I could glean from the graphics was that they liked the bento box style which is a popular graphics design trend right now.
I had no idea how to translate the site and turned to my husband who is studying Japanese. He recommended a translation app called Google Lens. You just point your app toward the Chinese and it translates it to English right on the screen. No typing Chinese characters necessary. Lens worked great on his Android phone, but not so well on my iPhone. On the iPhone Lens I was supposed to take a photo of the page and it would translate what was in the photo. It didn’t work. I then discovered that Google Translate had a photo function on it that did work.
Now that I could understand what I was reading on the Suning site, I determined that the logo was a little mascot logo of a cartoon sun. The smiling sun appeared in various places throughout the ad. The products were items like one would find on a Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club ad. There was an Eastern feel to the ad, a grace and elegance you don’t usually see in American ads. So how do I combine grace and elegance with a cute mascot logo on an ad with dozens of Wal-Mart-like listings.
Try as I could, I could not find a mascot that resonated with me. I ended up going with the elegance theme and using a small vase of flowers like one you would find in a tea ceremony. I used the colors from the graphic (grayish green and deep orange) as the color scheme for the whole ad.
Notice how the V made by the flower stems echos the Vs in the logo. I can’t remember what font I used (maybe Futura) but I remember I chose it because the perfectly round Os in the text mimic the dots in the .com and over the i. I added a buttercream background for the ad, again to add a little elegance.
Now for the grunt work. I placed the listings into colored bento box groupings. After placing ten ads I got tired and stopped. In an actual ad there would be dozens and dozens of listings. My readers will get the idea with just ten.
After the initial difficulties in figuring out the Suning site, the design for the ad just fell into place. The listings were tedious but I’m pretty happy with the results. From the buttercream background to the graceful logo to the gold elements in the featured Mother’s Day listing to the gentle bento box groupings, the ad actually does convey the subtle elegance found in the Chinese Suning site.