publication design
The San Diego Asian Film Festival (SDAFF) is the flagship event of Pacific Arts Movement, one of the largest media arts organizations in North America that focuses on Asian American and Asian international cinema. The festival occurs annually in the fall over the course of 10 days, while its "little sibling" counterpart — Spring Showcase — is a week-long event in the spring.
Over the past few years, I've had the chance to collaborate with Pac Arts's brilliant team of talented designers and marketers to expand each year's festival brand identity into scalable print systems. In the springtime, I produce mini-guide booklets that serve as keepsakes for festival attendees; in the fall, I produce a larger magazine-style filmmakers' booklet in addition to the larger festival's mini guide.
The Spring Showcase is SDAFF's "fun little sibling" — a weeklong film series that highlights a small but mighty curated selection of films from Asia and Asian America during the springtime. The program includes narrative features, documentaries, and special screenings, often sprinkled with community events such as filmmaker Q&As, panel discussions, and receptions.
The Spring Showcase brand identity for 2022 to 2024 was a deliciously colorful identity that packed a punch — lots of starbursts, mouthwatering candy colors, and patterns. Each year saw a different take on the hypnotizing and playful brand, and it was a fun challenge to iterate on a brand to keep it uniquely fresh each year.
The San Diego Asian Film Festival (SDAFF) is the largest exhibition of Asian cinema in the western United States, and one of the largest and longest running showcases of its kind in North America. The festival is dedicated to highlighting the diversity and breadth of Asian Pacific Islander and Asian international images, from impassioned independent voices and provocative documentary subjects to the top hits from the world’s biggest continent, the latest works from the masters of cinema, and the fresh points of view of Asian Pacific Islander American filmmakers.
SDAFF is a much larger-scale effort for publication design: mini-guides are typically 40-50 pages covering hundreds of films, and the filmmakers' booklet is a luxe, magazine-style keepsake — usually about 60-70 pages long — given to filmmakers whose pieces are showcased at SDAFF. Each year features a unique brand identity, meaning each fall requires learning how to expand and scale a fresh set of assets.
2023's featured the brilliant works of HongxKim, a Seoul-based design studio with a graphic design team of Eunjoo Hong, Hyungjae Kim, and Yelin Yi. The talented team at HongxKim brilliantly captured chaotic unrest and villain era vibes with monstrous forms, pixel dust, and mascot shapes for every letter in "SAN DIEGO ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL" — giving us an abundance of graphic stickers to incorporate throughout each spread.
Scaling this design was a practice in balancing high-contrast graphics with enough white space to keep the visual hierarchy focused on important content. Handling high-contrast "pixel dust" in small spaces is no joke! The result was a playful booklet chock-full of hidden monsters peeking out from behind key text boxes and luring guests into each page that followed.
2024 stepped into the otherworldly realm of Eileen Tjan's alien flowers. The centerpiece of the brand features a gate made from an alien material — "a structure that keeps people out, while simultaneously signaling something worth protecting." As Eileen Tjan describes it:
Gates can guard temples and welcome visitors. It expresses the tension between wanting to be understood and having the choice to conceal what makes us knowable. The sharp metal edges of the gothic letters add to clouds and colors that are both soft and unsettling. The typography is a digital approximation of an elegant serif, like an alien computer attempting to imitate romance. The flora are ominously vibrant. Their chrome electric petals feel like artificial flowers from a demon’s garden.
Scaling this brand identity was a master class in balancing simplicity with in-your-face graphics, layering soft gradients with textured elements, and introducing shades and tints to preserve adequate color contrast to make the designs as accessible for visually-impaired guests as possible. The result was a mystifying booklet, blooming with layers of surprises as guests turned each page.
Publication Design
Mini Guide Booklet
Filmmakers' Booklet
Adobe InDesign
Carmela Prudencio of Pac Arts,
marketing and communications direction
Stacey Uy of Stacey Makes Things,
brand management & art direction
Jannah Maling,
graphic design coordination
HongxKim,
brand identity for SDAFF 2023
Eileen Tjan,
brand identity for SDAFF 2024
