Details

Many moons ago, my friend Ashish and I started an Asian film magazine called subtitle, from there with the support of my friend Anna and many others, it blossomed into a community screening space, culminating with a film festival. Along the way, we've maintained a distinctive design for all of our fliers, posters, signage, website, and more.

Instead of being too caught up in a specific font or template convention, the design of subtitle is anchored very simply by its colors. A distinctive duotone of dark orange against the backdrop of a light pastel orange (maybe a bit of red for both) creates the cornerstone of the subtitle design. I wanted to pick a color that felt bold and eye-catching, but did not feel abrasive or too bright.

From there, the majority of the flyer designs focused on using fairly minimal design principles, by design and by utility. Since new flyers were needed quite often, there often wasn't a lot of time to iterate on an idea. So instead, many of the flyers relied on playing with one or two specific ideas. If you take a look at the flyers chronologically, I'm sure there's even ways to pick up when I learned certain Illustrator tools or picked up a new technique. Each design would often use just one or two specific transformations or adjustments.

Many designs played with the idea of the text as architecture, using the film titles as frames or as visual intrigue. On occasion, the flyer can play directly with the themes or topics of the film, such as with the Paprika flyer, which features layers of letters within each other.

The design of the website is honestly much simpler, and incomplete to a certain degree. The colors are replicated, and a simple two column home page opens to a full spread for articles. A nice touch with the website is the soft TV static look that is applied to every image. There is more work in terms of font selection, padding, and some other details that may be attended to at some point, but for now the design of the website is in the same boat as the website itself, on hiatus.

For the film festival, we wanted to maintain a similar theme, but give it its own identity as well. I worked with my friend Charmaine on the branding of the film festival, and more about that might come in another post.

As one of my first projects, and so also one of the first projects I had to create a cohesive design for, the legacy of subtitle design is the legacy of my process, an iterative process built on practicality but with the bandwidth for experimentation. Build at the speed of trust, design at the speed of urgency.