Interactive and Graphic Design in China: June 6th

Beijing and Shanghai are extremely advanced, and reminded me a lot of cities in America. But the presents of Graphic Design and interactive design wasn’t anything shocking or new to me. Any design that I recognized as good you could tell was made in America because they looked very similar and because the products they advertised were usually American products. All original Chinese design we found were all the same: mostly Chinese characters, bad pictures and a lot of red and yellow.

The Chinese are just as obsessed with interactive Phones and iPads as we are, may even more, but I didn’t find many interactive experiences that were impressive or new to me. They seem to be a couple of years behind America when it comes to public interactive pieces such as kiosks or interactive/animated advertisements.  For example, if you go to New York City, the walls are covered in motion graphics, but in Shanghai the walls were only covered in print advertisements.

Typography is interesting in China. The Chinese characters are so specific that only a couple of different types worked. If anything was written in English, it was probably in Helvetica or Dakota Handwriting (which I saw way too much)

One thing I really was impressed with were some of those logos, but like I said, they reminded me of something designed in the US.