The Chinese character poster

In our last class, we had a special guest came in. He is Professor Shen, come from Wuhan Textile University, China. He showed us survival posters designed by his students in our class, and it impressed me.

His entire posters are Chinese characters, each word has its meaning, also has the meaning behind it when people design it. One of those posters is “dance”, which is very colorful. It is designed for dance competition. All the colorful boxes line along and the composition of this poster is the Chinese character: dance. The different color boxes mean different dancers on the stage. Each one has his/her own dancing talent.

The last one is “technique” in Chinese. Just one word on this poster, it is written by brush pen and the meaning is a design project needs techniques to achieve the designer’s goal. But the word is very blurry and fuzzy. That means a good design needs to have an idea or creativity. Sometimes people use too much technique that makes the idea is less important. But idea is the most important process of design, not technique. If designer just stick on how to use technique but have no idea of the design, it will never be a good design. Therefore, the poster has double meaning in it; technique is necessary in design process but not important as idea.

I want to thank for Professor Shen, he gives us a great experience to understand design in a different view. The posters are very intriguing and meaningful to me. And I hope he had a great time in UCD.



"dance",Prof. Shen's student's poster

"technique" designed by Prf. Shen's student