An ad for Shanghai General Motors.

The site I got this said “we didn’t quite get this either,” so I’ll give a stab at it.

The aesthetic style of the backdrop reminded me of something I saw in a China Esquire a while back, and is, I…

Continue readingMy stab at analyzing a Shanghai GM ad…

Jared Braiterman, a principal at Giant Ant, recently showed me some of their work from their on-going research on youths and technology (dubbed “Mobile China China Mobile“).

Here’s an excerpt from one of their visual reports, entitled “Chinese Students Rarely Use Their Own Photos As Avatars” (download):

…

Continue readingA cross-cultural comparison of profile icons

Via One Inch Punch.

Image excerpts spliced from scans of 王曲, the official journal of Hu’s #7 military school outside Xian. These particular panels are about military training during the War of Resistance Against Japan.

I’ve translated it as best as I could given the image quality.

Taken from Frog in the Well, the China…

Continue readingGraphic journals during historic war

This caught my eye when I was writing that Google post the other day, and I couldn’t resist:

Baidu 少儿, or Baidu Kids, is beautifully done and reflects Baidu’s understanding of the Chinese market. When I was doing fieldwork in Beijing last summer, one of the teachers we interviewed said that some Grade 1 homework assignments involved running…

Continue readingSo what’s Baidu been up to?

A gander at the China version of Google Labs reveals several “new” projects:

• Google’s Windows app for pinyin input:
• A Life (生活) search, which includes categories such as train tickets, food, work, and housing.
• A Navigation (导航) portal, which serves a giant page of text links. Nothing…

Continue readingWhat Google’s China HQ has been up to…

Danwei has an interesting post about examples of Tibetan influences in Chinese typography.

I’ve excerpted some images & commentary from Danwei below:

The cover of an album by Han Hong, a singer born in Tibet whose songs
flavor generic Mando-pop with Tibetan influences. The 日 element in her
last…

Continue readingTibetan inspired typography

Found this on PostShow a while ago, finally got round to translating it.

Click image to enlarge.

Atelier FCJZ was China’s first private architecture firm founded by Yung Ho Chang, who is or has been, amongst other things, the head of the architecture schools at BeiDa and MIT. Fourteen years later, it now consists of more than fifteen architects and takes on hosts of projects every year in China.

http://www.fcjz.com

MAD…

Continue readingA glimpse at some architects in Beijing

The Virtual Goods Summit 2007, that took place last month at Stanford, “is a one day conference focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies.”

Amongst the speakers were representatives/top guys from mostly American companies like Six Apart, Habbo, and Linden Labs. And then there was a representative from China-based Tencent (creator…

Continue readingQQ spotted at the Virtual Goods Summit 2007