Assignment Three: Birthday Card

Research

How birthdays are celebrated in Malaysia:

In Malaysia, all birthday celebrations family and friends gather together to enjoy food. They may sing along together or play musical instruments. Friends or relatives who visit give presents to the person celebrating their birthday or they may give an ang pao. This is a small red packet filled with money. If relatives do not know what to buy, the money is a good present.

At about 16, when teenagers start to invite boys and girls to their parties there is lots of dancing and games to help find a partner. They often make their own games so that everyone eventually finds their own partner. The trick is always to have the same numbers of boys and girls!

At 18, birthdays are celebrated with family members or people may go to the movies with their girlfriend or boyfriend. At 21, people usually have a big party. At all birthday celebrations people have birthday cake with candles and they sing the 'Happy Birthday' song in English, Chinese or Malay.

Extract from BirthdayCelebrations.net

The Ideation of The Birthday Card

In my opinion, birthdays are often celebrated among children and young teenagers. They celebrate their birthdays by inviting their families and friends to their birthday party. When I was a child, I use to have birthday parties every year with my beloved family. My mom made me cupcakes so that guests who attended the party will not waste the cake. So, my mom made cupcakes instead. In addition, I like birthday parties which are based on a super hero theme and my all time favorite will be BATMAN. Those days, my birthday parties looked very colorful and noisy!

For this assignment, I have chosen this birthday card layout as my reference to my re-designed birthday card.

References

Based on these layouts this is the sketch of my birthday card

In this sketch, I use BATMAN as the character of this card because most children love superheroes characters. There are many famous superheroes characters in Malaysia such as Superman, Spiderman, Kluangman and many more. As for the cupcakes, it has become a common trend in Malaysia to serve many sizes of cupcakes to the guests. I also fill in the background with rainbow colors to describe a joyful and happening mood of birthdays.

Steps to My Birthday Card

I start with creating the rectangular shapes by using the rectangle tool in the background. Then rainbow colors are filled in these rectangular shapes.

I then trace my sketches using the 'pen tool'.

Then the cupcake is filled with colors to make it look cheerful.

The cupcake is placed on the background of the card.

Next, I traced the Batman character from my sketch and fill it with black and grey colors for the costumes and yellow for the belt.

The Batman character is placed below the cupcake as if it is lifting the cupcake. This is symbolize that cupcakes or cakes are the typical dessert served during birthday celebrations.

I also stylized the Batman character using the 'drop shadow' filter. Then I made a rounded rectangular callout using the 'rectangle tool' and 'twirl tool'. After that, I designed the callout using the 'extrude & bevel' 3D effect.

To decorate the cover of the card, I added black borders using the 'line segment tool' and 4 stars at the edges of the card using the 'star tool'.

For the greetings page, I used the 'symbol spray tool' and picked these shapes.Then I repeated the step to illustrate a garden for a harmony mood.

Lastly, the greetings are added using the 'type tool'. I decorate it by using different types of fonts and colors to make it look cheerful.

Final Outcome