Design stuff - at last!

Today we had the opportunity to have a more in depth discussion to the Chinese design students.

The first topic was to compare the olympic logos, Beijing 2008 and London 2012, which happened to be quite a nice coincidence. We came to the conclusion that the Beijing logo had a strong identity, the typography was in a calligraphic style and the use of red in the picture represented their culture well. The layout was very conventional though, many logos before had used the picture, name, olympic logo technique. I was worried that the Chinese students were very proud and weren't very critical of their own work, but was happy to see them give good and bad points for ours. I haven't really liked our logo, the same opinion as a lot of other people, but the more we talked about it, and understood the idea, the more successful a logo it became. In a way the two logos are totally opposite; ours breaks the tradition and pushes boundaries, where as we have little connection to the olympics or our own culture. but the sheer controversy has made our logo what it is.

The lecturers then did a small presentation on their own countries inspiration for design. I like how there are more relics, stories and symbols in China than in the UK, but it can sometimes be a bit much. And example is red being a lucky colour; I think that there is more focus on the meaning than on the aesthetics, and this way maybe design isn't being pushed as far as it could. It is nice to have links to traditional and sentimental things, but also they could have a bit more variety.

In the afternoon Kung Fu was organised for the British students. It used a lot more strength, focus and precision than I had first imagined. The moves were fenomenal, and I can understand how China excel at these sports that require concentration and no room for error.