Archive for the 'Design' Category

Tibetan inspired typography

Published
by
Jason Li
on July 29, 2007
in Art and Design
. 1 Comment

Danwei has an interesting post about examples of Tibetan influences in Chinese typography.

I’ve excerpted some images & commentary from Danwei below:

Tibetanfont1

The cover of an album by Han Hong, a singer born in Tibet whose songs
flavor generic Mando-pop with Tibetan influences. The 日 element in her
last name 韩 and the trainling stroke of the 红 are reminiscent of
Tibetan writing.

Tibetanfont2

This is Fan Wen’s 2004 best-seller Land of Water and Milk (水乳大地), which centers around French missionary efforts in eastern Tibet.

The Chinese characters in the title are Tibetan-ized - certain
elements have been replaced with Tibetan vowel indicators, and extra
Tibetan letters and markings are strewn about randomly. It’s surrounded
by the familiar mantra of Avalokiteshvara (both rightside-up and
upside-down).

Tibetanfont5

The best example of this practice is probably the movie poster for Lu Chuan’s 2004 western adventure, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol
(可可西里). To my eyes, the Chinese characters do a much better job of
evoking Tibetan writing than the examples given above, and the kicker
is that what at first looks like a series of vowel markings on top of
them turns out to be the the romanized title "Ke Ke Xi Li."

Link to full post on Danwei.

How a traditional Chinese painting looks 3D… and animated!

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 30, 2007
in Art, Commerce, Design and Education
. 19 Comments

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

The video above was produced by the Shenzhen branch of the Institute of Digital Media Technology (IDMT), which is associated with the Global Digital Creations (GDC). The GDC/IDMT group is located in Shenezhen, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. The Shenzhen base is a production house as well as school; the Shanghai base is primarily a school; and the Hong Kong & Singapore are for marketing and operations.

Both the websites for the Shanghai and Shenzhen centers feature demo animations but the Shenzhen site is the only one that carries work with a distinctively Chinese style.

Backtracking to the video above, the questions are: what is lost in the transfer from 2D to 3D, can the style scale to a film (a tv commercial it can surely do), and how long will it take before someone tries doing so?

Original video found over at One Inch Punch.

P.S. 2D animations of traditional paintings have been done in the past, I have a set of DVDs called 中国水墨动画 with a bunch in there — interesting, but it didn’t hold my attention beyond five minutes.

Web2.0 ware links US designers with Chinese manufacturers

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 19, 2007
in Commerce and Design
. 0 Comments

Kidrobot

37signals, the creators of Basecamp and other slick Web2.0 wares, has a post on their blog about how their software links up trendy, vinyl toy designers from Kidrobot in New York with Chinese manufacturers for cheap.

For 100 US dollars per month, "his team uses
Basecamp to share Illustrator files with engineers in China who
transform them into clay or wax models. One week later the models
arrive in New York. With Basecamp acting as the messenger, the two
sides repeat the back-and-forth until the toys meet Budnitz’s approval.
The final design — along with specs for paint and form-fitting
packaging — is then uploaded to Basecamp, and 30 days later finished
toys march off production lines in China."

The blog post compares this speedy manufacturing process with that of Mattel and Hasbro. But my question is, with the scale of Mattel and Hasbro and their more complex products, does such a hands-off approach make sense? In other words, is this an example of what is to come for all manufacturing or just for small, simple orders?

Link to original blog post.

Featured designer: Nod Young

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 17, 2007
in Art and Design
. 4 Comments

Nod Young is the art director/co-owner at Beijing-based Khaki Creative and Design and a graduate of the  Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua. Today, we shall feature three of his works that represent his forays into crossing the chasm between analog and digital design.

First up, using computer vector art to mimic and refine the aesthetic of traditional Chinese paper-cuts (剪纸). This one is of the King of Hell (阎王).

Nianhua

Second, using watercolor in a design that is often seen in vector form.

Watercolornod

(An interesting aside: the four characters on the bottom of the image above (Ai Lou Hu You) is, according to Nod, "a phrase that dates back to the days of
early English learners who were learning to say “I love you.” It’s
funny that “Lao Hu” also happens to be the word for Tiger.")

Thirdly, representing Chinese text as vector typography, always a difficult task because Chinese characters depend so much on small details (at least, compared to the English alphabet).

 

Yonghegong

Link to Nod’s Flickr.

The Chinese Animated Shorts Oscars!

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 14, 2007
in Art, Design, Video Clips and Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

Cnanishortsoscars

Was poking around Chinese video-sharing website 6rooms today and discovered a link (shown above) to the Chinese Animated Shorts Oscars!

I hunkered down and watched quite a few of them, which I’ll highlight before moving onto my conclusion:

Animated1

生活原来是这样的 (Life is Actually Like This), by students at the Beijing Film Academy, is one of the most popular and highly-rated shorts. It cuts between animation and live action a few times, features some pretty slick swerving camera shots, and is subtitled in both English and Chinese. The plot follows a chain-effect story, which is somewhat common within animated shorts.

Animated2

花鞋子 Colorful Shoes, by the TianJin Academy of Fine Art, is my favorite pick. It’s a nicely produced claymation set in a village, and despite a threadbare plot, is incredibly evocative of a mood + scene/setting.

Animated3

And then, screencapped above, a couple of shorts that didn’t really stick for me: A 3D bad guy plotting stuff; the Empress meets the first animators; and daddy loves his daughter. As you can see the production values were also quite a bit lower than the first two films. (In the animation world, that translates to a lack of time, a smaller team, smaller budgets, or less experienced artists.)

My conclusion? It’s looking up for animation in China — there are positive signs in terms of production values, plots and an air of experimentation. However, the work here still lags behind that of the top art schools, say, in the US.

The catch is which factor causes this lag: time spent, access to technology, technical skill, or "creativity"?

Uneducated hobbyist builds backyard bots

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 9, 2007
in Commerce, Design, News, Television and Travel
. 5 Comments

Chinese man. Builds robots. In his backyard. Some walk. Some pour tea. The latest pulls a rickshaw.

His wife of course, prefers that her husband spend her time more productively and make money rather than fidgeting with robots in the middle of the night, and sometimes burning down the house (happened once — didn’t stop him).

Spotted by the BBC, surprisingly enough. If you don’t want to sit through the entire clip, watch the last 30 seconds.

Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have a DIY/geek community backing him (as he might in the US), especially since he lives in a semi-rural area. This phenomenon is similar to Lyn’s post about the homemade planes, which in the US is backed a small but intense community of "ultralight" enthusiasts. When will the proliferation of the internet in China link up like-minded DIY hobbyists? And what will be the nature of the Chinese DIY community?

Via Suicide Bots.

featured design: [not-Chinese, Danish] paper art

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 7, 2007
in Art, BBS and Design
. 11 Comments

Paper Scenes: Appreciating Engraved Paper Creations was posted May 31 07 at the design show forum at Yesky.com, a  popular Chinese IT portal.  The photos came from a Netease BBS, apparently, but a quick Baidu search didn’t turn up anything more, and there’s no artist attribution. I don’t even know if it’s Chinese, frankly, but most likely Asian at least. More photos at the site–check out the paper waterfall cut from the middle of a page…Update: not Chinese at all! These extraordinary pieces are by Danish artist Peter Callesen, who we now know thanks to Liz.  I don’t think the Yesky design editor knew where they were from, which is why they were left unattributed. 

Paper_fig_1

Paper_fig_2

Paper_fig_3

podcast: on China’s “eco-Potemkin village”

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 6, 2007
in Design, Government, Podcasts and Politics
. 1 Comment

Ethical Corporation is a publisher and conference organizer on corporate ethics–broadly defined.  Their material is fresh and thorough.  You can sign up for a newsletter, and they have short podcasts as well.

Listen to this podcast with Toby Webb, EC’s Editor, and Paul French, their Asia-Pacific Editor (who is also publishing and marketing director at Access Asia), discussing Dongtan, the Chinese eco-village project being built on Chongming Island outside of Shanghai.  The second part of the interview is mostly about the politics of this project at home in the UK, which is a great illustration of how these international development projects always have multiple motivations behind them.  Of interest:

"…now every province in China wants to do one of these.  It’s almost as if, if I build this small green village with a couple of windmills and some solar panels, then we’ve done with the environment and I can go back to my strip mining and my dirty steel mill." 

"Now what they’ve done is scare all the [migratory] birds away by building these environmentally friendly buildings…so in a sense you’re destroying the natural environment in order to create an environmentally friendly environment…"

For more on Dongtan, link via CDT, see the IEEE Spectrum magazine’s excellent article, "How to Build a Green City."

One tiny critical point, a genuine question for those of us who are foreigners and think and write about China: why is it that so many of us continue to use the Cultural Revolution as a reference point for what’s happening today?  Isn’t it kind of like using the San Francisco Summer of Love, 1967, as a common reference point for understanding something about current American culture?  The CR was between thirty and forty years ago–that’s a long time.  Of course it had a massive impact on many levels, but so did the free love/sexual revolution/women’s liberation 1960s movement in the U.S., but we don’t continue to reference it.  Or maybe we should?

Chinese DIY: story of a homemade plane

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 3, 2007
in Design, Translation, Video Clips, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 3 Comments

Our first subtitled Chinese video! It’s the story of Wang Qiang, a Sichuan barber who grew up making model planes and eventually built his own and became a self-taught pilot. This is one of the things I love about China–an ordinary guy can build his own plane and fly it, without a whole lot of interference from anyone.  Especially in rural areas.  The government appears to be trying to crack down on some of them, according to this story of a farmer-pilot from Zhejiang province.  And not everyone is as lucky as Wang Qiang: an amateur Beijing pilot (called the "birdman" recently had a crash. 

For those of us interested in translation work: to do this I used mojiti.com and would definitely recommend it.  It’s unbelievably intuitive and easy to use.  You just tell mojiti what video you want to upload and it does it for you, then you add "spots" to it.  You can get anything that’s on Youtube, Yoqoo, Tudou, and a number of other sites. I think that the video is "open," meaning that someone else could go in and edit the translation or add their own spots.

DIY car mod, China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 16, 2007
in Design
. 3 Comments

As car culture grows in China, I can’t wait to see how Chinese enthusiasts customize their cars.  Here’s a set of photos from Moobol/Molive (a photojournalism website) showing a DIY car interior complete with laptop and GPS. 

As the caption says, "a this little QQ unexpectedly did has a completely modern remodel!" (I’m not familiar with the phrase "little/small QQ 一个小QQ but it’s cute). And: "it’s a second hand laptop with a touch screen, 1000 RMB (about US $125). You can listen to music and see your GPS location.  There’s a GPS device that cost around 800 RMB (~ US $100) that allows you to know your location at any time via satellite."
Diy_car