See You Anniversary
Campaign Visual Direction
Overview
A full campaign visual system developed for a theatre production by Nine Years Theatre.
The project covered creative direction, art direction, design, photography, and merchandise development, creating a cohesive visual language across campaign and physical touchpoints.
The Challenge
To create a campaign capable of expressing the emotional complexity of a long-term marriage through a restrained two-character narrative.
The visuals needed to balance intimacy and emotional distance, while evolving beyond conventional romance imagery into something layered and psychologically reflective.
Approach
The campaign was built around candles as the central visual device across all phases of the promotion.
Traditionally associated with romance and celebration, candles also carry associations of grief, remembrance, vigils, and hope. This duality became the foundation of the visual system, allowing the campaign to move fluidly between tenderness and emotional weight.
The visual rollout was structured across:
Merchandise Extension
Tea packaging developed as a continuation of the narrative and symbolic language of the campaign.
Character Visuals
Individual compositions of the husband and wife navigating a familiar domestic space while emotionally disconnected. Each version places one character in focus while the other recedes into blur, reflecting shifting emotional perspectives within the relationship.
Key Visual
A stylised candlelight dinner overwhelmed by excessive candles, transforming a romantic setting into a crowded landscape of memories, anniversaries, and accumulated emotional history.
Concept
The campaign explores how memories and shared milestones can simultaneously connect and burden a relationship over time.
In the key visual, the candlelight dinner setting is intentionally overcrowded with candles of varying heights and sizes. These candles represent anniversaries, first experiences, memories, and emotional residue accumulated throughout a marriage. What initially signifies intimacy gradually becomes spatially restrictive, mirroring the emotional tension between the couple.
The character visuals extend this idea through focus and perspective. While the couple occupies the same physical environment, only one remains visually present at a time, creating a quiet tension between familiarity and emotional separation.
This visual language transforms everyday domestic imagery into a metaphorical system reflecting love, distance, memory, and endurance.
Execution
The project was executed with full creative oversight across all visual and merchandise outputs:
- Creative direction and campaign strategy
- Art direction and visual system development
- Photography and image production
- Design adaptation across campaign formats
- Merchandise naming and packaging design
Two tea products were designed as show merchandise for the production:
Beginnings (初心) Eternity (始终)
The names draw from the Chinese phrase 不忘初心，方得始终 — “Never forget where you began, and you will find your way to the end.”
Designed as a paired system — one in pink, one in blue — the two tins read independently but complete each other when placed side by side, with the titles combining to form 初心 · 始终.
The packaging motif was built by taking a corner element from the Nine Years Theatre logo and weaving it into an eternity knot — a structure of loops with no beginning and no end, holding every corner together..
Outcome
The campaign achieved strong audience and promotional reception:
- Positive engagement across audiences and media platforms
- Successful extension into merchandise and physical brand touchpoints
- A well-received production that later returned for a re-staging