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Salty Fish
UI Design | Branding | Editorial Design
OUR BRIEF
OUR CLIENTS
OUR JOB
Our task was to be working in a small group of four and constitute a set of ‘publishing houses’. Each publishing house will be tasked with creating a BLAD for a forth-coming publication as well as devising associated branding and periphery material to support both this forth-coming publication and your publishing house.
Our clients are Theory + Cultures cohort within the RMIT Fine Art department, with Associate Dean, Dr. Kristen Sharp. These RMIT Fine Art students have been tasked with producing a long-form piece of text on the subject of art practices and curatorial approaches within the Asia region, with a focus on China, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Australia.
Our job, as ‘designer publishers’, is to develop a publishable platform for this body of work that provides insight into current art-orientated publishing practices as well as opportunities for wider, strategised distribution via new and established networks currently available to designers and publishers.
Salty Fish Press
“DREAM HALTED, FISH SALTED."
‘Salty fish(咸鱼)’ is a common and popular Chinese network buzzword, describing people who are unmotivated, unremarkable, and unambitious in life. People who often descend themselves with this term normally realise they have mediocre lifestyles. There is also a term called ‘flipping the salty fish’, as it means although you are hopeless and mediocre, even a salty fish can have the opportunity to flip over, as in having a reversed life. We are a group of designers who believe in this ‘philosophy’ that even though we are unmotivated for most of the time, we still secretly wish for a chance to flip over, and do our best in our lives.
Identity Systems
The Salty fish signature is the most fundamental part of our branding system, as it is an icon that represents our publishing house and visually explains the purpose behind our concept. From online/print platforms to social media/peripheral products for advertising purposes, it plays an important role to represent our identity.
Primary Signature
Secondary Signature
Logo Only
The outlining of the salty fish is the defining feature of our design branding system, which will be used multiple times for different purposes. The font Inter is a hand script style, which matches well with our doodling and minimalistic style of our logo illustration. Do not alter the proportions of our logos under any circumstances, as multiple options have been provided with primary and secondary signatures. The relationship between the signatures are predetermined and fixed.
Online Publication
As we like the idea of how virtual art book fair aims to utilise their experiences and connections to create a space where people can discover new art books and meet like-minded people in this new realm of the virtual. We want to create our website in a contemporary style that contains many interactive functions for a more immersive user experience, such as mouse-hover effect, click-and-drag function, which is easy to achieve in the Cargo platform.
Our website divides different types of contemporary arts created by Asian artists into three main categories: abstract expressionism, activism, and feminism. Each artist we have chosen expresses different opinions about different issues with different approaches: sculpture, calligraphy, interactive installation, performance art, etc. These Asian art has a unique approach.
To have a stronger branding, we decided to enhance our personal style as a more playful with a more vibrant colour palette. The colour orange, yellow and purple normally gives the impression of positivity, which is what we want to portray for the future of contemporary art. Therefore these three colours will be mainly used for our homepage and the cover of our offline publication, whereas dark grey and two sandy colours (one darker when hover) are chosen to be displaying the actual articles from fine art students, with the reason that these colours are more minimal and won’t be affecting the readability of texts.
Expressionism
Activism
Feminism
We are selected!
Our online publication has been selected by our clients — RMIT Fine Art department and the RMIT Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) students. We progress our design response into an online publication populated with written pieces from Re-Shaping Worlds students. Final publication outcome can be found here.
Print Publications
For our offline publication format, we will be curating three separate books for each category in different sizes: abstract expressionism, feminism, and activism. Each colour will be a symbolic colour for each topic’s cover with illustrations explaining. Our goal is to achieve the concept of individual publication yet they can be combined and unified as a whole as well.
A4 - Feminism
B5 - Activism
A5 - Abstract Expressionism
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