Inspiration

I'm Chinese-American, and growing up I never really learned that much about traditional Chinese culture and how it shapes today's society. In this class, one of the topics my professor taught us was: Chinese Design. I didn't think much of it before, but as he went on the more intrigued and interested, there was so much history and foundational concepts behind Chinese style design that I didn't grasp before. This got me thinking as our final project deadline approached, how it would be refreshing to take something from Western culture and redesign it in a way that integrates traditional Chinese culture as well (like me and my personal identity haha).

Design Statement

The co-branded logo we designed will integrate the culture of Disney's animation Inside Out 2 with the traditional Chinese art of Peking Opera, which focuses on the core concept of "emotional expression". Peking Opera face-changing is a unique art form in traditional Chinese culture, expressing the rapid changes in the characters' inner emotions, while Disney's animation Inside Out shows the exploration of emotions, family conflicts and adolescence in Western culture through the characters' inner emotions. We found that whether it be China or abroad, in contemporary society, young people often hope to express their emotions and needs in some way without having to speak, which is what we want to reflect through design.

First, we looked at the traditional colors of Peking Opera face-changing, such as red, purple, black, white, blue, green, yellow, gold, silver, etc. Each color represents a different emotion and psychological state. For example, red symbolizes passion or anger, blue conveys calmness or melancholy, and gold and silver express nobility and hope.

Then looking at our characters from the animation, we matched the Peking Opera masks with the corresponding emotions. For example, Anxiety's hat is gold, as gold is a color that symbolizes someone of "god-like" status in Peking Opera, and in the animation Anxiety had the most power and control over all the emotions. When dealing with some ambiguous emotions that were hard to define with one color, we incorporated elements of another color onto their hats to combine meanings.

Application

Expressing our concept through the design of clothing and accessories, users can express their current emotional state through these products and patterns, being able to convey their mood without words. Similar to the concept of mood rings, we can use simple and intuitive graphics to make it easy for people to identify each other's emotions.