PACGA Miku Poster

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a poster design for Purdue Animation Comic Game Association (PACGA) printed and distributed on Apr 1st, 2025.

Central Character: Hatsune Miku

The poster centers on Hatsune Miku, a globally celebrated virtual singer from Crypton Future Media’s Vocaloid software. As a cornerstone of anime and “otaku” culture, she represents creativity, technology, and community—values that resonate deeply with PACGA. Her iconic status and widespread recognition make her a fitting ambassador for this student-led animation, comic, and game association.

Target Audience

The target audience of this poster is Chinese-speaking people at Purdue University.

Design Concept and Cultural Inspiration

Hatsune Miku is portrayed in a meditative, cross-legged pose, inspired by Buddhist imagery and the playful meme “初音菩萨” (Hatsune Bosatsu). This concept stems from a visual pun: the character “音” appears in both “Hatsune, 初音” and “Kannon/Guan-Yin, 观音” (the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy). Further tying into this theme, “Purdue University” phonetically resembles “普渡大学” (Pu-Du Da-Xue), evoking the Buddhist idea of “普渡众生” (Pu-Du Zhong-Sheng, saving all sentient beings). These cultural references, popular within Chinese-speaking circles at Purdue, align perfectly with the poster’s target audience, as evidenced by its use of Traditional Chinese characters, enhancing its thematic depth and humor.

Design Process and Technical Workflow

The creation process leveraged advanced AI tools over a week-long journey:

Image Generation: Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) was employed within the ComfyUI framework, with ControlNet’s OpenPose ensuring precise control over Hatsune Miku’s meditative stance.
Post-Processing: Initial outputs were refined in Paint.NET for adjustments, then enhanced and upscaled via an img2img workflow to add intricate details.
Model Choice: Despite newer models like Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large and FLUX dev being available in April 2025, SDXL and SD1.5 were selected in the community for their robust plugin ecosystems in ComfyUI and WebUI, offering superior control and excelling in anime-style generation—ideal for this project’s aesthetic.

Final Assembly and Typography

The poster was polished in Photoshop, integrating key design elements:

Fonts: The pixelated JFドット東雲明朝12 font was chosen for its retro, playful vibe, reflecting PACGA’s casual, student-driven ethos and complementing the pixel-art theme. The right side features gradient text in Morganite, guiding viewers toward a QR code with a call to action.
Layout: A dark blue-to-purple gradient background with subtle pixelation frames Hatsune Miku, while additional text in Traditional Chinese reinforces the community invitation.

Creative Journey and Impact of AI

This project, spanning roughly one week, involved extensive conceptualization of the character’s pose and layout. Embedding AI workflows, particularly Stable Diffusion, was transformative. Sourcing an image of Hatsune Miku in a meditative pose would have been nearly impossible without AI, requiring costly commissions or extensive searches. This technology democratized the process, enabling independent creation and saving significant time and effort. The experience underscores AI’s potential to revolutionize design, fueling excitement for its future applications.

This poster blends cultural wit, technical innovation, and community spirit, delivering a visually striking and meaningful design tailored to an important part of PACGA’s audience and mission.

Early 2D Graphic Designs for PACGA

Sat, 26 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This document outlines a collection of early two-dimensional graphic design projects created for the Purdue Animation Comic Game Association (PACGA). The primary focus of these works is the development of functional and visually distinct posters and ticketing materials for student events. While the overall design approach occasionally incorporates collaborative digital illustration, the core structural elements rely heavily on typography and strategic textual arrangement to communicate event details effectively to the campus audience.

PACGA Maid Cafe 2019 Promotional Materials

The promotional campaign for the 2019 PACGA Maid Cafe required a cohesive visual identity across both public advertising and physical admission materials. The central poster design features a digital painting of a maid character, created in collaboration with illustrator . The layout utilizes a specific color hierarchy, placing bright yellow and orange typography against the darker, depth-of-field background of the illustration. This contrast ensures that critical event details, such as the October 26 date, the specific time frame, and the Third Street Suite 159 location, remain highly legible. The text placement is balanced around the central figure, guiding the viewer’s eye from the prominent event title in the upper left down to the ticketing logistics at the bottom right. The poster is shown as the featured image of this page.

The physical tickets for the same event adapt this visual identity into a functional, handheld format. The front of the ticket maintains the character artwork by Zhiyu Cao but shifts the color palette to a softer cream background with dark brown text, establishing a clearer contrast for printed text. The layout includes structured demarcations for guest titles and a clearly defined stub section on the right edge. The reverse side of the ticket is dedicated entirely to logistical information, organizing five distinct one-hour time slots for the cafe sessions. Additionally, the back layout incorporates a row of three QR codes linking to the organization’s social media presence across Facebook, Instagram, and Weibo, providing attendees with immediate access to future updates.

Typography-Driven Recruitment Design

A separate project for PACGA involved creating a recruitment poster designed specifically to capture the attention of the anime enthusiast demographic. This piece heavily references the iconic typographic style of the anime series . The design discards traditional pictorial elements in favor of a dense, high-contrast arrangement of sharp white text on a solid black background.

The composition integrates various recognizable anime quotes, community inside jokes, and organizational information arranged in intersecting horizontal and vertical alignments. The alternating font sizes, weights, and varying text orientations create an overwhelming visual density. This approach serves a specific functional purpose: it acts as an immediate cultural signal to the target audience familiar with the source material while creating a striking geometric pattern that stands out on crowded campus bulletin boards. A central QR code is embedded directly within the typographic grid, integrating the primary call to action without disrupting the established aesthetic framework.

Poster Design | Yu-Chao (Curtis) Wang's Personal Website