Project Overview

Rather than illustrate the festival literally, the brief was to borrow directly from Rickshaw Chitro — the itinerant, self-taught painting tradition found on Dhaka’s cycle-rickshaws — as a ready-made vernacular visual system: its palette, its ornament, its way of building a picture from flat, saturated shapes rather than tonal rendering. The poster explores a hybrid visual language that merges that cultural nostalgia with digital connectivity, reflecting both the spirit of Pohela Boishakh and the technological identity of the RUET community.

The final artwork sets a Boishakh street-gathering scene — friends sharing tea under RUET’s iconic campus gateway — inside a hand-painted floral-and-peacock border, with the event’s own hand-built Bangla title, “বৈশাখী আড়্ডা ১৪৩১” (Boishakhi Adda, 1431), treated as the poster’s centerpiece rather than an afterthought.

Process

Motif

Flowers, birds and creeper flourishes — the natural, decorative vocabulary that borders almost every hand-painted rickshaw panel in Dhaka — repeated as a continuous ornamental band around the poster’s edge.

Mnemonic — Logotype Development

The title lockup, “বৈশাখী আড়্ডা ১৪৩১,” was hand-built as its own piece of rickshaw-style lettering — flourish patterns symbolizing Bangla calligraphy — pencil construction first, establishing the shadow logic rickshaw signwriters use to make flat paint read as dimensional metal, then finished in the poster’s red–blue–yellow palette.

Elements

Butterfly, peacock, rickshaw, owl, flower — a small stock of recurring rickshaw-art iconography, built as reusable elements that could carry the same visual language into flags, banners and the festival’s other collateral.