Victorious Performing Arts Company

Victorious Performing Arts Company is a youth K-pop dance and performing arts school based in the Puget Sound. They are an exclusive school that accepts students by audition only. They host quarterly dance shows, most recently at the 2022 Puyallup Fair and Shoreline Community College.

Their largest event to date was held at the IKEA Renton Performing Arts Center in February 2023. They initially approached me for designing an event poster, ticket, and event-related materials. Over the course of these projects, I discovered additional design needs, which included a new company logo and a website.

With the client's permission to share my work, I've described my design process for these projects below. The projects showcase my skills in illustration, graphic design (for digital and print work), web design, photography, and video editing work.

Update 06/2024: The Victorious Performing Arts Company website has not been updated since the project concluded in December 2022. The website displays out-of-date information and has removed/edited parts of the website that were mentioned in this project summary. As I understand from the owners, the company has experienced a lot of changes, including opening a second studio and moving operations. I am hopeful that we can collaborate in the future for another website update.

Company Logo

After creating the event poster, I was requested by the client to create a new company logo. The process took about 1 week, and these were the steps I took in designing it:

Meeting the Client

I met with the client to talk about their needs and what they wanted to see in the new logo.

Being a young company and in a niche section of the dance/youth education industry, the client wanted a logo that would elevate their company's branding. They had just undergone a name change from Seattle Youth Kpop to Victorious Performing Arts. They wanted the logo to reflect this change, emphasizing the need for a more professional look.

Click on any of the images to enlarge them in gallery mode.

Moodbords

Shapes

A monochromatic style that emphasizes soft curves and abstract shapes. This would provide great contrast to the sans serif fonts, which are versatile, modern, approachable, and clean.

Dark pink and dark magenta were chosen, because they represent love, hope, beauty, and imagination. Off-white and near-black will be used for text and backgrounds to let other colors shine.

The focus of this creative direction is to convey a sense of professionalism and creativity that would appeal to adults (e.g. parents of students).

Illustrative

This creative direction was inspired by kawaii design styles and art school aesthetic, which feature cute, stylized characters. The art feels hand-drawn, which convey a sense of playfulness and youthfulness. The fonts are a combination of a whimsical serif (which features curved ligatures that swirl under and over other characters) and a geometric sans-serif.

The colors were strategically selected for the following reasons:

Pink: sweetness, youth, imagination
Warm yellow: creativity, warmth, friendliness
Purple blue: trust, calm
Pure white: purity, cleanliness, to be used for backgrounds to let other colors shine

This design direction focuses primarily on illustrations, which can be used for a variety of applications and contexts. The overall feeling is cute, whimsical, and delightful, intended for youthful audiences.

Collage

A contemporary-feeling design style that evokes Korean fashion magazines and blogs. This creative direction focuses on aesthetic photography, collage, soft pastels and gradients.

The heading/display font is art nouveau-inspired, conveying a sense of whimsy and fantasy. This is balanced by a quadratic sans serif for body text. The initially chosen are as follows:

Soft green: calm, nurturing
Periwinkle light blue: A variation of Pantone's 2022 color — symbolizes happiness, hope, and optimism
Cornflower blue: depth, imagination, insight

If I were to pursue this design direction, I would also add touches of yellow and pink to add energy and vibrance.

In summary, this mood board represents a dreamy, contemporary design direction.

Click on any of the images to enlarge them in gallery mode.

As part of the design process, I met with the client and asked questions about their design needs. Afterwards,
I spent 2 hours for research and mood boarding. I used Canva to create the moodboards so they could be shared with the client easily.

I presented 3 mood boards (shown at right) to the client, each representing possible creative directions.

Event Poster

Retro Hand-drawn Flair

This poster focuses on a hand drawn couple with elongated arms and legs. A rainbow "dances" in the background, filling negative space and directs viewers to the event information at the bottom. This poster has a slight gradient color treatment, which also directs attention to the bottom of the poster.

The typography is lifted directly from the mood board inspiration. The hand-lettered event logo "Dance with Me" imitates the elegant ligatures of the Kaoly font.

I did make a major departure from the original mood board inspiration by not including the color yellow. Instead, I focused primarily on pinks and purples, which reflect youth, love, and creativity.

Colorful Rainbow

"Dance with Me" is presented in a modified Kaoly font. I really like the elongated ligatures in letters such as D, M, and S. I made it the focal feature of this poster while keeping everything else relatively simple and center-aligned.

To play up the youthful energy of this event, I used a rainbow backdrop.

Music Sheets

I wanted to experiment with a photographic element for this poster concept. In Photoshop, I made the main background with 4 layers of opaque color, flowers, grain, paint strokes. It created an abstract, hand-made feeling that felt distinct from the other poster concepts.

The logo "Dance with Me" is a combination of modern block letter and a bright script.

I decided to place the event logo off-center to create visual interest. The addition of torn music sheets in the corner balances the composition and directs attention to the event logo.

In the center of the poster, I created a K-Pop girl group. They are drawn in a cartoonish style, which is intended to be friendly and approachable for viewers. The characters wear white, black, and dark purple, whose colors closely reflect the color scheme from the Shapes mood board. I admit that this was a significant departure from what the client chose (a bright and youthful color palette). In retrospect, I should have paid closer attention to this and would have changed the colors for the client presentation.

Another change I would have changed to this poster would be to place the event information higher on the poster.

Playful Hand-drawn Style

The hand-lettered event logo "Dance with Me" imitates the elegant ligatures of the Kaoly font. I placed the logo off-center to create visual interest. The flower in the corner is intended to direct viewers to the event logo.

The cascade of flowers continue down the poster, placed around the boy and girl characters. The circle in the background was intended to serve as a container for some of these elements.

Of all the poster concepts, this one was the furthest from finishing. There are some elements that are confusing and others that I would have changed. Even though this poster concept was not selected by the client, they did select the characters to use in the final poster design.

The client selected the "Illustrative" mood board as a starting point for poster design. I used this board as inspiration for creating several concepts, which are seen at the gallery on the right.

Illustration, hand-lettering, and graphic design for 4 poster concepts took 1 full week. At the end of the week, I presented these concepts to the client. After selecting their favorite design and characters, I made changes based on the clients' selections, which took an additional few days.

Click on any of the images to enlarge them in gallery mode.

Final Poster Design

Here are the final designs for the poster and ticket designs.

I prepared the files for client hand-off by preparing the design files for print (creating printer marks, converting colors to CMYK) and digital use (RGB). I ensured that the individual projects were organized and easy to identify.

final_victorious kpop poster 19.7x27.8_CMYK_Cartoon couple with purple-blue background.png

victorious kpop poster mockup_edited.jpg

final_Ticket Dance with Me_CMYK_5.5x2.75-01.png

Click on any of the images to enlarge them in gallery mode.

As a starting point, I met with the client to talk about their concerns about the current website. (I took the above screen recording of the website for reference.)

There were some issues, including:

Everything was on 1 page, forcing users to scroll up and down for information
The client expressed that the website did not feel professional, describing the font, color choices, and the overall design as "awkward" and "amateur"
There were features that the client did not need (e.g. Live Chat, Member Login) and others that were missing (e.g. Event Tickets, information about the school and its teaching philosophy)

After completing the company logo and event poster projects, I had the opportunity to redesign the website for Victorious Performing Arts Company.

The "Before"

After meeting with the client, I did some research on websites created by other dance companies, schools, and colleges, paying close attention whenever youth dance, performance, or music classes were mentioned. I took a lot of inspiration from Cornish College of the Arts, as well as PopRox, and CoffeeDance Studio. During this research, I made sketches of potential layout designs using pencil and sketchbook. Overall, this process took less than 2 hours.

The Process

This was my favorite part of the process! I went into Wix and started designing. The process took 6 hours for the initial launch version.

In that time, I did some much-needed work on the website, including:

Reorganizing the website's information hierarchy, carving out clear categories of information
Created multiple touchpoints for the user to see and interact with Events, which are a big money driver for the business
Dividing information into two separate pages: 1) the Home page as the place for users to read highlights and see event ads; 2) the "About Us" page for users to read more information about the school's teaching philosophy and backstory
Photo editing, creating 5-sec ad videos (created using Canva) that could be used on the company website and social media

The client was satisfied with the initial results of the website. Their event "Dance with Me" was a sold-out success. The client said that there were many positive reactions of the website from students and parents.

Update 06/2024: The Victorious Performing Arts Company website has not been updated since the project concluded. The website displays out-of-date information and has removed/edited parts of the website that were mentioned in this project summary. As I understand from the owners, the company has experienced a lot of changes, including opening a second studio and moving operations. I am hopeful that we can collaborate in the future for another website update.

The "After"

Victorious Performing Arts Company

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