Fifteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

While social and cultural forces contributed to the decline of graphic design practice and education in favor of political propaganda messages in China, reforms in the Chinese economy beginning in 1978 played the key role in driving the country’s economic revitalization. This study examines the way in Min Wang (b. 1956) and design teams based at leading Beijing universities, the Art Research Centre for the Olympic Games (ARCOG) at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and Tsinghua University—exemplified the changes in Chinese graphic design in light of the economic reforms beginning in 1978. The design teams produced sports pictograms based on ancient Chinese writing scripts for the XXIX Olympiad. Olympic identity systems are part of an important development of symbol systems for international and multilingual audiences in graphic design history. A Chinese creative visionary who led the development of the Beijing Olympic graphics program was Wang, a graphic designer who assimilated aesthetic principles, through the medium of graphic design, the art of Chinese writing, and cross-cultural design to blend elements of contemporary Western design and traditional visual arts in China. This study concerns itself with the creation of new Chinese artifacts which are produced in digital form. The presentation will examine the question of how and why Wang and the design teams’ development of extensive design standards sets their work apart in a quest to reaffirm the Olympic spirit by straddling the divide between China and the West and follow in the tradition of Olympic pictogram designs.