Fruit Series — Illustrated Posters

Fruit Series posters: Ackee, Blueberry, and Orange, illustrated in bold color with bilingual English and Japanese typography

Fruit Series: Taste of Where They Grow

I've always admired rar3hare's flower posters on Instagram. Bold color, riso texture, English and Japanese type working together. When I moved to Japan, that bilingual layout started to make sense in my own work too.

Instead of flowers, I chose fruit. Each poster ties back to a place, the country or region where that fruit is most at home. Papaya and the Dominican Republic. Orange and Thailand. Blueberry and the wild fields of North America, where it doesn't belong to one country, it belongs to a whole continent.

Fruit Series Banana poster: illustrated banana bunch, Southeast Asia origin, bold purple and yellow bilingual typography

Fruit Series Orange: original mandarin photograph on blue background, source image for illustration

Fruit Series Orange: hand-illustrated mandarin poster with grain texture, Photoshop process result

The process

I start with a real photo of the fruit, then take it into Photoshop and rebuild it by hand. Color, grain, texture, one layer at a time, until it stops looking like a photo and starts looking like something printed on old paper.

For most of these posters I also designed a custom letter-mark logo, built from the Japanese font I used for the large display type in that specific poster. Every poster carries nutritional facts and small stories about the fruit, written in both English and Japanese.