This project looks into the fusion of cultural tradition and modernity in visual communication design.

Enlightened by the font style of the seals in the painting and calligraphy works of Chinese ancient literators, I design the logo and brand identity from my name for my design studio. By deconstructing the form of the Chinese characters in my name, I reorganize the strokes following the style of the traditional seals to get the logo; meanwhile, I eliminate the complicated elements from the ancient works to integrate the intangible cultural heritage with the modern simplicity.

Inspiration

Chinese traditional literati painting is a comprehensive aesthetic art that integrates poem, calligraphy, painting, and seal. The perfect integration is where the essence of the national culture lies. Seal, as one important part, combines the features from calligraphy, font design, and crafts and contains deep cultural deposits as well as artistic value. Inspired by this cultural background, I started this project to make the logo and identity design.

Development

By deconstructing the form of the Chinese characters in my name, I reorganized the strokes following the style of the traditional seals to get the preliminary logo design. I eliminated the complicated elements from the ancient works to integrate the intangible cultural heritage with the modern simplicity.

The preliminary logo was refined with grids and Fibonacci pattern.

After finishing the logo design, I carved the design on a bloodstone with hand tools and used it to make stamp print. For the color of the print, I chose two typical traditional Chinese colors which are Gangqing (Steel Blue, R20, G35, B52) and Zaohong (Purplish Red, R124, G24, B35).

The brand identity design proceeded from the logo design. As XYG Studio focuses on creative design, I designed related promotional products such as postcards and leave behinds as well as web pages and printed portfolios based on the photos of my previous works and the logo design.