🎨 Creative Brief: Haiku Comics Campaign

Client: **Japan National Tourist Organization (JNTO)**

Source: Haruo Shirane’s Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons

Medium: Sequential art + poetry (haiku comics)

Audience: You determine! But readers unfamiliar with Japanese seasonal aesthetics and the relevance of haiku today

✨ Background

In his book Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how Japanese art and literature are woven into the rhythm of spring blossoms, summer heat, autumn leaves, and winter snow. It’s about culture as a calendar. Poets, painters, and everyday people turned seasons into a shared language of beauty, memory, and feeling.

Your mission: translate Shirane’s ideas into haiku comics: short visual stories that combine the power of words and images. A haiku goes beyond observation by offering an element of surprise.

Each comic should be a window into how the four seasons shaped Japanese culture. And also resonate with today’s audiences who are in often in a hurry.

🎯 Objective

• Bring Shirane’s scholarship to life in a fresh, visual, and poetic form.
• Help audiences understand why seasons matter in Japanese culture.
• Use the brevity of haiku and the accessibility of comics to create an inviting cultural campaign.

🌱 Inspiration & Research

• Haruo Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (skim intro + seasonal sections)

• Classic haiku by Bashō, Buson, Issa

• Visual references: ukiyo-e prints, manga’s use of ma (negative space), contemporary webcomics…your sponge (absorbing aesthetics everywhere.)

  Pages from Graphic Design Thinking Lupton.pdf