Gene Lu

Before diving into the details of this project, here's a brief description of DramaFever.com: DramaFever.com streams today's most popular Asian dramas. It's one of the first sites to host Asian dramas in a legal manner, whereas in the past, people viewed videos illegally on Youtube, Veoh, etc. The problem with the latter was that once uploaded to the sites mentioned, they were quickly taken down due to copyright violations.

The Project
DramaFever.com needed badges for it's special guests attending their launch party early August 2009. Before going straight to design, I did some research. I came across some inspiration and ideas on the web and also had a few badges from past events to refer to, but still wasn't fully satisfied with what I had in mind thus far.

Some excellent examples of badge design

The layout of the information and the hierarchy was there, but the visual aesthetics weren't. Someone had mentioned to me that the preliminary design for the badges were a bit stark and I totally agreed. What got me out of my design rut was when a partner at DramaFever told me via email "[...] event badges are souvenirs. Think of each badge as a takeaway mini advertisement". Ah ha! At that moment, my minimalistic, pragmatic blinders were removed. 

Prelim design for badges - left: staff badge, right: non-staff badge

Concept
The main concept was to (re)introduce badge holders popular dramas of old and new. To accomplish this, I made the dramas, which could be found at DramaFever.com, one of the top priorities in the design. Characters from different dramas were placed on the various badge types (VIP, Volunteer, Press, Sponsor, and Staff). On the back side of each badge is a description of it's respective drama along with an invitation to watch it online at dramafever.com.

Lesson
Minimalism helps to establish the hierarchy of design, but in this case, not the design itself.

Staff Badge Featuring Coffee Prince (drama)

Artist Badge (Cinderella Man)

Press Badge (Goong)