Chinese UI & Branding Insights
Ideas are mysterious things. Sometimes the worst ones smell like solid gold, sometimes the profit-driving powerhouses masquerade as giant turds. Telling the difference, it seems, takes a certain measure of psychotic genius. Where, for example, is the hazy boundary of brilliance that separates the Slinky from, say, Picnic Pants? Maybe I just have no vision,…
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Distances in Beijing are awkward, irregular beasts. The city blocks, for one thing, are ginormous, clocking in at about 10 hectares a pop. Can’t really picture the size of a hectare? Yeah, me neither. But there is this: in Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Global Practices, Raymond J. Cole and Richard Lorch write: “A typical…
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It wasn’t long ago that second-hand was a no-go zone for retail in China. There’s no glory in a gently-used trampoline, and a light film of shame still taints second-hand purchases. But that, like every other damn thing, may be ripe for revaluation. In an April 2016 piece exploring China’s changing attitudes towards buying second-hand,…
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Tencent just dropped v2.0 of their mobile OS, and the UI is flat as fuck. It’s also kinda “meh”. Here’s a quick preview of the interface (video by MO Studio):
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This post is so long overdue, I had to pour coffee on it to induce labor. Okay, here we go: if you’re just getting started with Chinese fonts in web design, this is a follow up to the Beginners Guide to Chinese Font-family Declarations, so maybe read that first? Anyway, after that post went live,…
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Hoo! You remember back in 2005 when this was true? “The research findings show that consumer privacy protection, security control measurements, brand and size of the companies are most important factors, while consumer’s characteristics and perceived easiness of using the Web site that have no significant influences on consumer trust.” (The influenced factors to online…
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The numbers are counted, the 汤圆 are eaten, and Spring Festival 2016 is officially wrapped. WeChat released an overview of Chinese New Years user stats, and Chinese branding blog Pingwest (who recently launched their own UI makeover) was all over that hot data pile with a digestible infographic. I’m translating Pingwest’s original post, with a…
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Nice project by 付禹霖 of Broussaille Design out of Beijing: the Chinese cover of Gibson’s “Burning Chrome”.
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Taidu is one of several typefaces created by Hong Workshop out of Guangzhou. “Taidu” is the Chinese word for “Attitude”, an attribute this tight-packed heiti (sans-serif) carries a lot of. It was a bit difficult to choose from Hong’s typeface library, considering they’ve got some great stuff in there, like this psychedelic typeface Sifangge: And…
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I presume you’ve used a login form before (no? Hail, and welcome to Earth. We have tacos). And I presume you’re familiar with the basics: you speak “friend” and enter. But China’s login processes, driven by environmental and behavioral factors, are perhaps a little different than what you’re used to. “Factors”, you say? I can’t…
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And suddenly, triangles:
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I keep wanting to say something like “the mainland Chinese aesthetic tendency towards dreamlike product imagery is disappearing”, but the more I paw through the design galleries, the more I’m convinced that just isn’t true. All the single product landing pages, all the “editor’s choice” banner ad designs, all the ecommerce apps, many of them…
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This is a great example of beautiful lettering and modern design: talented illustrator Mr. Geng created some spiffy animated graphics for a beautiful HTML5 light app invitation by Tencent Video (腾讯视频) / QQ Music, promoting an upcoming Live Music event. For those of you who have WeChat or a QR scanner on your mobile device,…
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Hey nerd faces, Tencent’s game design and creative team TGideas just released a cool light-app based report outlining eight conclusions from mobile behavior data aggregation and testing. I’m gonna translate here, but if you’re a WeChat user and you’d like to run through this on your phone, do this Chinese-style and scan the QR code…
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Dorking around on travel sites is my weird little self-soothing, time-wasting extravagance. I don’t know what’s so exciting about plane ticket listings, I just like them. I like them in the way I like cheesecake and Pearl Jam. I once wrote gushing fanmail to Adioso because I thought their human-centered approach to ticket search was…
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Man, you rarely see stuff like this on the Chinese net: interesting dive into design thinking as Chinese branding blog Pingwest interviews the designers of three major Chinese character-based app icons. The post splits app icon designs into two categories, those that use a Chinese character to represent the app (Taobao’s 淘, Facebook’s lowercase f),…
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We like to think that every decision made by giant conglomerates is backed by years of research and considered decision-making, but if you’ve ever gotten close to a multi-national company, you’ll know that’s rarely the way it works. Lift a corner of most rugs and you’ll find a sick tangle of legacy procedures, insane process…
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I know, I know: this is mostly supposed to be an interactive design archive. But Jesus, there’s this gorgeous four-book project by Gong Xinyu at Noyau Design. Gong Xinyu’s idea involves an abstract four-book series, the first “The Family Register”, the second “Love Letters”, the third “Book of Blood” and the fourth “Posthumous Writings”. Check…
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Sometimes you have one of those conversations that’s so full of new ideas, it pinballs around your head for days. I enjoyed one of those recently while interviewing a source at a Beijing-based mobile game localization company, a man responsible for reviewing non-Chinese mobile games and assessing whether or not they’re a good fit for…
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We’ve been huffing and puffing about this for years, guys. We’ve been flipping out over Chinese tech firms and all the international copyright violations. Most of the articles covering the topic point with outrage to blatant and large-scale duplication by Chinese companies – take everything from the Guardian’s 2006 “Got an Idea? The Pirates of…
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