Just last week, my very first interactive narrative was published on China Daily’s website. The story was about an American born Chinese high school student who went to volunteer in a poor village in China’s Sichuan province. He wrote a diary chronicling the first five days of the trip and the story came with over 300 photos! Unfortunately, many of them didn’t make it in the presentation.
The narrative was built in Flash. Check it out here.
Last month, I participated in Startup Weekend in Beijing. Startup Weekend is a worldwide event. The idea behind it is to launch a startup business in 54 hours. The conference attracts project managers, program developers and designers to help launch these startups. At the end of the weekend, the startups are pitched to an audience of investors, and the top two ideas are selected.
The weekend begins with idea pitching. Conference attendees with a business idea are given 90 seconds to pitch it to the entire audience. Once the ideas are pitched, attendees vote for their top three. From there, the top six winners are selected and teams are formed around those six.
Startup Weekend in Beijing was unique because a vast majority of the attendees were Chinese. Because there were few foreigners (i.e. me), they decided to hold the 90 second pitches in Mandarin.
Needless to say, I had some difficulty understanding them. I got the gist of most of the 26 pitches, but my limited industry Mandarin could only get me so far.
Something that made the Sina Weibo (a.k.a. Chinese Twitter) rounds recently: this side by side comparison of two nearly identical front pages from The People’s Daily, China’s largest newspaper.
Left: The People's Daily from March 14, 2010. Right: The same paper on March 14, 2011.
Some background: the annual “Two Sessions” — a two-week-long series of meetings held by the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and National People’s Congress (NPC) — were held this March. The Two Sessions received extensive press coverage here in China, with many papers — including the one I work for, China Daily — devoting a few pages each day and special web sections to the meetings.
After the final day of meetings, the People’s Daily published a front page that looked almost exactly like one from the same event a year ago.
The Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report Blog did notice a few differences:
In both cases, a large photo of eight of Beijing’s top nine leaders sitting hands folded (and in the same order) on the main stage in the Great Hall of the People appears to the left of a smaller photo of CPPCC chairman Jia Qinglin standing before a bank of microphones holding what appears to be a copy of his closing speech in his right hand. Close examination reveals minor differences—a slightly different expression on Mr. Jia’s face, a slightly different bright-red necktie, a barely detectable upward tilt of the head from Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.
This isn’t an uncommon practice, either. Here are some People’s Daily front pages from the Two Sessions throughout the years:
2001
2002
2003
2004
I’m excited to announce that starting next week, I will be joining the China Daily staff as a designer. It’s an incredible opportunity and I can’t wait to see what the job has in store for me. The China Daily launched a redesign a little over two months ago.
My flight from Shenzhen to Beijing departs later today.
(And for those of you fearing my return to the States: Relax. You have at least another 6 months until I come home again.)
Update: Charles Apple blogged about it.
Back in the States, Christmas ads start popping up the same day Halloween decorations are taken down. I’m sure that would be the same case here in Shenzhen, that is if the decorations from Halloween are ever taken down.
Yes, you read that correctly. As of today, Wednesday, November 18, the Halloween-themed ads for Pepsi Max are still lining the sidewalks of Shenzhen:
Some strange font embellishments on the text of an ad for Pepsi Max.
Of course, along with Halloween ad campaigns come strange font embellishments for the copy. You may recall that I spotted a sign last month outside my school that had equally strange holiday font gimmicks.
EDIT: If I’m reading this correctly, the phrase with the Jack-O-Lantern characters should read “做鬼不做胆小鬼.” Roughly translated, that’s “Get into mischief, don’t be a coward.”
This sign outside my school reads: "I love you, China." The bottom part says something about China's 60th birthday.
National Day was a very big event for China this year. Businesses and workplaces went out of their way to make the perfect 60th anniversary decorations. In the weeks leading up to the festivities, it seemed like the entire city of Shenzhen was covered with ads for 60% off specials.
My school, Luoling, also got caught up in the guoqing (National Day) spirit. The week before the October 1 holiday, I noticed that they changed one of the signs to the entrance of the building (pictured above).
Naturally, my designer instincts kicked in. I began to analyze the sign by guessing how many Photoshop layers and techniques (i.e. filters, feathering, gradients etc.) the artists used.
The word for "love" in Chinese (pronounced "ài"). Their use of hearts as strokes would be the equivalent of us dotting our i's with hearts.
Then my eyes were drawn to the fonts. Upon closer inspection of the character for “love,” I had to laugh.
Apparently the graphic artists, in keeping with the theme of loving China, replaced some strokes with little hearts in the character for the word “love.”
How … cute.
On that note, I’ve been studying the signs across the city, and I’m beginning to get a good idea of what the main typefaces are for Chinese characters. From the looks of it, there are very similar classifications (i.e. serifs, sans serifs, slab serifs and decoration fonts). In a later post, I will discuss these.
Bridget O'Donnell, 24, is a designer for the Shanghai Daily. She previously worked for the China Daily and graduated from the University of Michigan in 2009. More »