Taobao is a Chinese online shopping ad website that uses steampunk design to generate their

advertisement poster as we can see from the hot air balloon which has “shopping festival” written
on it and the board that has Chinese characters on it. This Taobao ad can be seen as a mere
basic shopping ad but it actually implicitly sells creativity, imagination to everyone just like its
name which means “searching for treasures”. The steampunk design made the whole poster’s
setting historical and gives off a sense of fantasy and science fiction this plays an important part
since a good design and ideas always attract customer’s eyes due to the peculiar design. The
historical setting may be associated with their goods, they can be selling goods from different
eras and the sense of fantasy signify their goods or their “treasures”. The title itself, “searching for
treasure” symbolises the discovery of an item hidden underneath which could be connected with
fantasy and science fiction. It is indirectly telling the customers that they are selling all different
goods as much as what they could’ve imagined. The centre of the poster is a character which has
a slightly different colour tone from the background and his appearance is slightly brighter just as
though he radiates brightness around drawing attention to the viewers eyes. On the other hand,
he also carries quite a lot of things. This shows that the designer wants the viewers to focus on
the character showing that he had just went for treasure discovering-shopping adventure. The
objects on the poster is scattered around hinting that it is a market as well as standing by to be
located. The hand, stairs and the brown background colour could act as a symbolism. The hand
may act as the customers’ hand being able to pick and buy anything they wished to. The stairs
might symbolises adventures where it is possible to access everything and anything. The brown
background colour is famous in China as it is considered as a wind-water or “feng-shui”. The
ancient traditional Chinese believe that the way you construct your house, setting up objects
affects your health, success and happiness and the colour brown brings good luck and success.
Suggesting that this is a Chinese online shopping advertisement, it is no surprise that they used
such colour. The main aim of this poster is to highlight the fact that they sell goods from different
types of countries and eras which can be purchased anytime.