Hasta La Ideas

This system of illustrated characters and animations was developed to help people learn to read Chinese, and is one of the 76 projects nominated for Designs of the Year 2014 (+ slideshow).

Taiwan-born entrepreneur ShaoLan first began developing the Chineasy characters as a way to teach her own English-speaking children to read traditional Mandarin Chinese, by creating a visual connection to the words.

Having struggled to find a straightforward way to negotiate the huge number and complexity of Chinese characters, she teamed up with graphic artist Noma Bar to develop a system of shapes representing some of the most commonly occurring symbols, which can be combined to create more complex phrases.

“I created a methodology that breaks down thousands of Chinese characters into a few hundred base building blocks,” explained ShaoLan. “When these building blocks are combined, they form compounds that can in turn be combined to create phrases. Through this method learners can quickly build a large vocabulary of characters with very little effort.”

As well as providing users with a memorable way to understand the characters, Chineasy aims to offer those living in the West an insight into Chinese culture in a visual format.

“It is educational, social, cultural, and I hope, inspirational,” said ShaoLan. “I am demonstrating the beauty of this deep and ancient culture with a modern interpretation through sleek modern design.”

The entrepreneur spent her evenings selecting and sketching suitable characters to form the building blocks of the Chineasy system, which she then modelled on her computer and refined to create contemporary graphic representations that could easily be understood by Westerners.

Having presented the initial idea at a conference organised by innovation forum TED that was published online in May 2013, the interest she received encouraged ShaoLan to begin working on a book and launch a Chineasy website and Facebook page.

A campaign launched on crowdfunding site Kickstarter exceeded its goal of £75000, eventually achieving £197626 of backing that was used to publish the first Chineasy books.

The books are now being published by Thames & Hudson and an ebook and app have also been developed to illustrate how to write and correct stroke order through simple animations and give tips on pronunciation.

Chineasy was nominated in the Graphics category of the Design Museum’s shortlist for Designs of the Year and features in an exhibition at the museum until 25 August.

Here’s a project description from ShaoLan:

Chineasy

Chineasy’s aim is to bridge the gap between the East and the West. I want to give the west a real understanding of China and an appreciation of Chinese culture through their own eyes rather than layers of packaging and manipulation.

It is evident that people are hungry to learn about China. People are keen to be able to communicate with the 1.3 billion people. Tet there is not much out there to enable them to do so. Whilst the entire Chinese population is learning English, the west is struggling to comprehend this complex economy and society with their own eyes and judgment. Knowing their language is the key towards true understanding.

Chineasy will become the first step for anyone in the world who wants to understand China, Chinese culture and its language. It is educational, social, cultural and inspirational. I am demonstrating the beauty of this deep and broad culture through a modern interpretation using sleek and simple design.

Chineasy’s goal is to allow people to learn to read Chinese easily by recognising characters through simple illustrations. The magical power of the Chineasy method is that by learning one small set of building blocks, students can build many new words, characters, and phrases.

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to make learning Chinese easy appeared first on Dezeen.

Irish designer Johnny Kelly has debuted a short movie that attempts to show how design impacts on everyday life using basic shapes and without words (+ movie).

Directed and designed by Kelly, Shape was written by graphic designer Scott Burnett, who is creative director of Dublin-based Studio AAD. The movie shows a day in the life of a nuclear family, but also illustrates some of the changes that happen over time “so slowly that we never really think about them”, Burnett told Dezeen.

“The characters are actually affecting the changes themselves in the film, everything changes and shifts to suit their needs,” said Burnett. “They’re very much part of the changes, the daughter understands this and has more control, the Dad doesn’t so is hijacked by a series of chairs.”

Commissioned by Pivot Dublin as part of its remit to promote the value of design, the brief for the film included a stipulation that no text or voiceover be used so it could be understood universally.

“Having tried to explain design, and particularly its value, to everyone from sisters and grandmothers to politicians and CEOs, I know that it usually takes about ten seconds until people start to glaze over,” Burnett told Dezeen.

“In the end we did the only sensible thing and decided not to try and explain design, but just to show it. Its prevalence, its impact, its role in everything we interact with.”

The film is set to be used in schools and classroom in Ireland as part of the MakeShapeChange campaign to raise awareness about design. This informed the style of the graphics, which aim to create something that is immediately understandable for a young audience.

“I like that it is simple enough to be watched small on a phone, in fact you could probably watch it at postage-stamp size and it would still make sense!” Kelly told Dezeen. “When it comes to characters, I find the simpler they look, the more you empathise with them. So I started with a square, circle and triangle and went from there – Saul Steinberg has a lot to answer for.”

“In a lot of ways, all we did was animate the idea that good design is invisible, which is the bit that’s always hardest to communicate to people who aren’t designers,” explained Kelly. “They get the ‘designer’ stuff, the added extra, all bells and whistles version, but it can be really difficult to explain the invisible bit.”

“We didn’t want to highlight supposed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ design – that’s not the aim with this film. Rather we wanted to show how almost every thing around us has been designed, and can and will be re-designed,” he added.

Pivot Dublin – the organisation behind Dublin’s bid to be named World Design Capital 2014 – worked with Dublin City Council to commission the project. Despite coming runner up to Cape Town, Pivot has continued with its original plan to promote the value of design in Ireland and is collaborating with other design capitals to use Kelly and Burnett’s film internationally.

Here’s some information about the film:

MakeShapeChange

As part of PIVOT Dublin, the city’s bid to become World Design Capital 2014, project initiator Ali Grehan thought that a simple animated film, that somehow explained what design was, would be a great way to expand the conversation, providing a way in for the wider public. Post bid, PIVOT Dublin has continued as planned to promote wider acceptance and use of design as a tool for positive change.

In 2012, Ali approached director Johnny Kelly to collaborate on making the film, and he in turn approached designer Scott Burnett to help write it. The challenge was to show what design was, and why it’s important in a way that could be understood universally, so without language. Simple. After exploring several ideas the team did the only sensible thing and decided not to focus on design at all.

MakeShapeChange is a project to get young people thinking about how the world is made around them and where design fits in. It’s grown from a film to a website to an education programme.

‘Shape’ is the short film at the heart of the project, highlighting the changes happening around us that we don’t ordinarily notice, and how they affect us. The website makeshapechange.com hosts the film and provides a prompt to Think Design. Breaking the film into a series of scenarios, it presents design within wide contexts, prompts curiosity and identifies some of the practitioners working in these contexts.

As part of the project we’re developing an initiative to get designers into schools to talk about what they do and the difference it makes. And to come full circle, while Dublin came runner up to Cape Town for World Design Capital 2014, both Cape Town and previous host Helsinki are keen to collaborate on projects that use the film to educate, connect and explain. We hope this network will grow to include more partners.

The project was commissioned by Pivot Dublin and Dublin City Council.

Directed & Designed by Johnny Kelly
Written by Scott Burnett
Produced by Ali Grehan
Production company: Nexus
Nexus Producer: Isobel Conroy
Animators: Felix Massie, Joe Sparrow, Alex Grigg and Johnny Kelly
Gif Wrangler: Alasdair Brotherston
Editor: Steven McInerney

Thanks to Mark Davies, Sergei Shabarov and Chris O’Reilly
Special thanks to Cllr Naoise O’Muiri and Dublin City Manager Owen Keegan for their support

Music & Sound Design: Antfood
Ensemble: Andrew Rehrig (flutes), Will Bone (trombone, trumpets, tuba, baritone sax, tenor sax I, clarinets), Jesse Scheinin (tenor sax II), Wilson Brown (pianos, guitars, synths, percussion), Chris Marion (strings)
Composition and Arrangement: Wilson Brown
Sound design: Spencer Casey, Charlie Van Kirk, Wilson Brown and Pran Bandi
Final Mix: Andy Baldwin

The post Johnny Kelly’s short film demonstrates
the role of design in everyday life appeared first on Dezeen.

This short movie by Danish animator Thallis Vestergaard traces the history of the bicycle from its invention in the eighteenth century up to the present day (+ movie).

Produced by Visual Artwork, a studio based in Denmark, Evolution of the Bicycle is a brief look at the different variations the two-wheeler has gone through in its 200-year history. It highlights how the design of the bike changed through the innovations and whims of different inventors.

The sequence starts in 1790 with the Velocifere by Frenchman Comte Mede de Sivrac. His invention featured two wheels, a piece of wood and a horse saddle, and is said to be the first instance of a bicycle, but had no steering.

Sivrac’s creation was improved upon by English inventor Denis Johnson, whose Dandy Horse, unveiled in 1818, attached a steering bar, increased the size of the wheels and made the bike lighter than Sivrac’s.

In 1839, Kirkpatrick MacMillan, a Scottish blacksmith inspired by steam locomotives, created the world’s first pedal powered rear-wheel driven bicycle.

Then in 1869, Frenchman Eugene Meyer created the Penny-Farthing, whose name was a reference to the oversized front wheel and disproportionately small rear one. He is also credited as the inventor of the wire-spoke tension wheel which is still used today.

Designers continued to play with the idea of different sized wheels, including G.W. Pressey’s American Star bicycle. This version swapped the large front and small wheel round, making it easier to steer.

It wasn’t until 1885 that the public first saw what would become the standard shape for a bike. J.K. Starley’s Rover Safety Bicycle featured two identically sized wheels, a saddle perched between them, and peddles attached to a crank, which drove a chain to turn the back wheel.

The design was refined by C.D. Rice before the development of the racing handle bars and simple saddle attachment we know today, which feature in the final evolution of the animated bike before it cycles away.

The post Watch the design evolution of the bicycle
in a one-minute animation appeared first on Dezeen.

Après Music is Math, l’artiste russe Tatiana Plakhova a fait une série intitulée « Orbital Mechanics » dans laquelle elle retranscrit de manière très graphique des formes circulaires s’apparentant à des globes terrestres, atlas et au système solaire. Un série complète à découvrir dans la suite.

Tatiana Plakhova’s portfolio.

Iconic works from artists including Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Marcel Duchamp and more are reinterpreted as cross-sectional drawings of buildings in this series from Italian architect and illustrator Federico Babina (+ slideshow).

The collection of 27 images, entitled Archist, playfully interprets the styles and themes of some of the world’s greatest artists including Picasso, Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, and imagines them as architectural forms.

Babina explores the symbiotic relationship between architecture and art, and how they would interact with each other.

“Art and architecture are disciplines that speak and lightly touch each other,” explained Babina. “The definition and function of architecture is changing constantly with the development of contemporary art.”

The artist tried to imagine what a house designed by Dali or a museum designed by Miro might look like.

“A sculpture is like a micro-architecture, a facade can become like a painted canvas and a building can be shaped as in the hands of a skilled sculptor,” he said.

Among some of the most recognisable works is Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book style and block colour schemes laid over a Modernist-style house on stilts.

Sliced images of Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych are spread across rooms decorated in bright colours with two Campbell’s tomato soup cans placed atop the rectangular building.

Damien Hirst’s 2005 piece Wrath of God featuring a shark set in formaldehyde and his colourful dot series Mickey are used to bring a modular building to life.

An eclectic and almost random arrangement of shapes make up the Picasso building, echoing the artist’s dabblings with Cubism.

Marcel Duchamp’s building, meanwhile, draws on the artist’s Roue de Bicyclette, reinterpreting it as a pulley system watched over by the Dadaist’s Fountain urinal.

Salvador Dali’s distorted and surrealist shapes are propped up by wooden stilts and feature windows resembling an eye and nostril in Babina’s interpretation.

Joan Miro’s Dancer is used to liven up a square building with the addition of circular and square windows and a deep blue finish.

“Painting, sculpture and architecture have always been complementary disciplines that influence each other and grow and develop among common paths,” Babina concluded.

The artist is planning on turning this and some of his other work into a book.

Previously, Babina created an illustrated series of film sets in self-contained cross sections called Archiset. He also designed an alphabet of illustrated letters that depict buildings by 26 famous architects.

Here’s some information from Federico Babina:

Can a work of art be a building ?

ARCHIST is a playful interpretation of the expressive language and aesthetic of some of the most popular artists. I enjoyed creating 27 “paintingsprojects” which represented 27 different artists.

There is a Symbiotic Relationship an implicit partnership between Architecture and Art, different art branches meet in many fields.

Art and architecture are disciplines that speak and lightly touch each other, the definition and function of the architecture are changing constantly with the development of contemporary art.

In this exercise of style I took pleasure imagining architecture steeped of art, designed and constructed through the interpretation of an artist’s language.

Art, architecture and sculpture are historically linked by an unbreakable thread, we find examples of paintings and sculptures having a direct influence on architectural design.

It is easy to find the art hidden behind an architectural shape or see reflected a geometry of a building painted on a canvas. It is impossible to conceive of the history of art in exclusion from that of architecture.

Painting sculpture and architecture have always been complementary disciplines that influence each other and feed to grow and develop along common paths.

A sculpture is like a micro-architecture, a facade can become like a painted canvas and a building can be shaped as in the hands of a skilled sculptor.

I like finding the hidden architecture in parallel universes, in this sense, the illustration helps me to explore alternative languages.

I tried to imagine how it would have been a house designed by Dalí or a museum designed by Miró.

These images represent an imaginary and imagined world of shapes that uses the brush to paint architecture.

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in Federico Babina’s Archist Series appeared first on Dezeen.