Sài Gòn Thơ Fest (2025) Visual Identity (P.5)

The extension - assets and thoughts on campaign design 

One thing about designing for small scale campaign is to allow room for flexibility. Being free from bureaucratic complication, it means things will be shifted around as much as possible to accommodate changes in resources, strategy or even personal inspirations. 

Another thing to be mindful about is different clients will have different way to balance their content between visual and text to fit their communication style. While it is totally possible to suggest some options you think best fit their audience, it is best to respectfully adhere to their own decisions since more often than not, they are the ones who know their own target audience best instead of your own personal impression. 

For this project, client's man channel of communication is Instagram posts where they request visual design with minimal text in it for most of the content will be typed out in the caption. 

Typographic system will be maintained with certain fluidity to ensure unity of different posts while being adaptable for different length of feature text.

Colors and graphic elements are used to create distinctions between posts of the same categories and also to maintain the coherence across the board as more and more posts are to be added in as we go. 

Especially for Instagram, I think the best way to plan a unifying yet eclectic tile is in the order of Color, Density, Layout and then Treatment of Graphic Element. 

However before doing all that, there should be some visual momentum put in place to establish the palette as well as general feel. KV by itself is usually enough but I personally feel like using only one item as the foundation might carry the risk of rigidity and unexplored potential. 

Let's start with the key visual we have at hand 

With that we have the color palette of roughly this

The risk of this is every post might be too loud with striking color. Flat silhouettes are good to express the general concept but otherwise repetitive and limited, especially if there are real-life photos to be featured in posts later on. Therefore, For the post after launch, I would like to introduce more texture and real life photographic elements to open up the overall visual lexicon of the campaign so elements can blend together in a more natural and organic way to emphasize the storytelling quality of the event, rather than divide them in to strict functional area that might appear too utilitarian and mechanical for a poetry event. 

Thus, the second post ends up looking like this 

Carousel is quite a good tool for visual storytelling as well as gradually introducing / revealing / expanding the inventory graphic elements. Now that we have achieve a photographic feature into the visual language of the campaign, the next step is to map out the Instagram tile based on Color (preferably Density and Layout too but I haven't really been able to managing my time well to affording doing everything at once like that yet. Definitely better if I do) 

First step is to lay out all the posts/sketches I already have, combining with the color palette to achieve this general plan. Things are laid side way for easy viewing of carousel posts for now. 

After that, I have a general plan of color and slowly add in posts that fulfill the aura of the color. The point here is to flexibly adapt the color feel and not use the color too literally. 

Here are what we have so far: Left: Original plan - Right: Some posts are added after applying the planned color feel. 

Let's go into more detailed. 


For the 3rd post - To introduce the concept of the festival, I initially plan to go the route of using a blend of photographic elements + silhouette/flat graphic. The initial plan also involves using more flat color to provide some visual rest given first 2 posts are filled with details. References include

Yet I got carried away and make something like this instead 

It strays too much away from the original concept and also not very pleasant. There for I scrape it and go for back to even more basic composition using existing elements like the text wave, the gradient. So I have this 

A more editorial effort, impactful enough to be a stand-alone. But here are the rest of the spread

 ....To be continued.