MTR West Island Line Posters
Nov 20, 2013
The final assignment of my typography course was to create a series of 3 posters for a company. As you may know, the new West Island Line of the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) has 3 stations (Kennedy Station 堅尼地城站, Hong Kong University Station 香港大學站 and Sai Ying Poon Station 西營盤站), and will be officially opened at the end of 2014, so I decided to choose the new line as the theme for this assignment and to create a poster for each of the stations.
Please note that the posters I designed here are not the official posters of the MTR. They were created to fulfill the project requirements of a typography course that I have taken. The copyrights of the logo and corporate graphics used in the posters belong to the MTR.
Research
- Company Background
- The MTR is one of the world's leading railways (According to the MTR website).
- It is the largest railway system in Hong Kong. (According to Wikipedia)
- It has 46.4% market share of the franchised public transport market, making it the most popular transport option in Hong Kong (According to Wikipedia).
- Purpose of Posters
- To inform passengers of the completion of the West Island line and the opening of its stations
- Target Audience
- All MTR passengers
- Locations of Posters
- All MTR platforms
Mind Map
Below is the mind map I used to generate a few ideas about the posters.
Further Research
From the brochures of the West Island Line, we can know that the colors for the 3 new stations are blue, green and purple.
Here are a few posters of the MTR in the past. I wanted to make my posters consistent with the past ones in terms of styles.
Idea Exploration
I first explored the idea of growth of trees in the mind map. This idea was inspired by the beautiful website created by MoneyDesign in which names of webpage sections formed a tree. I wanted to use growth of trees to imply the growth and extension of the railway network. I tried arranging the positions of the station names and their sizes to form the shape of a tree. However, I found it difficult and quite time-consuming to do so, so I had to forgo this idea.
I went on to explore the idea of a compass, which implies that once a passenger enters a station, he or she will be able to arrive at many other locations in different directions through the railway network. Below is my sketch of this idea, but I found my execution a bit boring and monotone, so I also abandoned this idea.
The last idea I explored in the mind map is to extend the strokes of characters. By extending the strokes of the Chinese characters of the station name, I created a "railway network" that radiated from the station.
I also experimented with the idea of adding different colors to the extensions of strokes to represent different railway lines of the MTR.
Since the I wanted to use the station color as the background color of each of my posters, I decided to use only a single color for the extensions of strokes. I also added the station symbols to the poster.
Then I added directions to the "railway network", so that the station name will not be the only text in the poster.
Finally, I changed the angle and the perspective of the poster to make it look more dynamic.
Final Posters
Below are the 3 posters that I created for this assignment.
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Kennedy Station (堅尼地城站)
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Hong Kong University Station (香港大學站)
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Sai Ying Poon Station (西營盤站)
