final project

IN THIS WORK: For my final project, I carried out a dual concept rebrand of my favorite webtoon, Operation True Love, via two sets of three posters which I printed on glossy photo paper. The webtoon is set in a world where the love each person receives is assigned to them at birth via a number called ‘love points’; the story follows a girl, Su-Ae Shim, who was assigned zero love points and is looking for love before the engineer of the love point system terminates her, and the two boys who end up falling in love with her, Eunhyeok Go and Dohwa Baek. Inspired by the webtoon’s title, I decided to create two somewhat opposite concepts: “Operation,” which features clean lines and typefaces, grayscale images, fine-print text, low opacity, and numbers as a nod to the calculated decisions Su-Ae makes in her attempts to garner love; and “True Love,” which is characterized by bursts of bright color, high saturation, shiny and pixelated graphics, and elements from the digital world such as notifications and text messages. The characters’ names and tidbits about them are sprinkled throughout the posters, from the webtoon pulled up on the “True Love” poster of Su-Ae’s desktop screen, which she authors under the pseudonym of “Ae-Su,” to the love points on two of the “Operation” posters, which show Eunhyeok and Dohwa’s massive popularity compared to Su-Ae’s 0/0. As the webtoon was originally Korean, I designed one of the “True Love” posters with my own Korean handwriting in an attempt to replicate what I imagined one of Su-Ae’s diary entries would have looked like.

PROCESSES

1. Drafts I created in Illustrator for one of my posters - I experimented with "glitching" fonts, the shape inflator tool, and drop shadows for each element. 2. Writing and doodles I drew and scanned into Photoshop; I cut them out and changed them to be bright pink, which is the color I imagined Su-Ae to write her journal entries with! 3. Images taken directly from the webtoon and edited first with Illustrator to cut out and adopt the minimalist grayscale style, then with Photoshop to soften the colors and make the blacks and whites more subtle.