Author: Jason Li

Jason Li is an independent designer, artist and educator. Once upon a time, he studied engineering and ran a news site about fan translations of video games.
Chinese Comics Review

Kylooe: an emotionally-charged comics trilogy about trying to fit in

Posted on by Jason Li

Kylooe Trilogy Covers

The Kylooe trilogy brings us three stories of people who are trying their best to fit in with society. In book one, a shy, introverted schoolgirl struggles in her first days at a new middle school. In book two, a broadband salesman reminisces about his first, failed love. And finally, in the last book, a delivery boy finds himself stuck…

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Chinese Comics Review

A Borrowed Life: a superb comic memoir of a flawed Taiwanese patriarch

Posted on by Jason Li

Cover of A Borrowed Life

In A Borrowed Life, esteemed Taiwanese writer-director Wu Nien-jen pays tribute to his working-class father by telling the latter’s life story. His story was made into an award-winning movie way back in 1994 (also called A Borrowed Life), and now it has been retold in comic form. The graphic novel has a grand, sweeping, filmic quality…

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Typography Design

Chinese fonts are really, really hard to make

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Nikhil Sonnad has penned a great primer on Chinese fonts on Quartz called The long, incredibly tortuous, and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font. Much of the article describes the lengths designers must go to in order to create Chinese font:

The default set for English-language fonts contains about 230 glyphs. A font that covers all of the…

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Starting Up in Shenzhen

A fictionalized tale of 1 upper-class, 1 lower-class woman working in fashion in Shenzhen

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Zoe Ho from Seeed has started a great series on Medium: a parable of two women from the extreme ends of the economic spectrum who both work in the fashion industry in Shenzhen:

CoCo… is always talked about, gossiped or admired with jealousy. Sometimes she cannot accept any imperfection, and would like to get…

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The Politics of Pork Industrialization In Modern China

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A friend pointed me to this superb paper by Mindi Schneider on “Meat, manure, and the politics of agro-industrialization in contemporary China.” In it, Schneider highlights plenty of interesting facts, figures and findings about the social, economic and environmental impact of the pork industry in modern-day China.

On the historical context of pigs and pork in agricultural China:

…

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A status update on China’s high-end industrial development

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China recently announced it will begin producing and selling its first large passenger jet (since 1980 according to Wikipedia). In response, James Fallows penned two great posts, with accompanying charts, about what this means for China’s industrial development. Here’s his summary from the second post:

The chart was a shorthand for the theme I had…

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Chinese Comics Review

Review: Ping Pong – the collective comics magazine

Posted on by Jason Li
Photo of the first two issues of Ping Pong
Photo from 乒乓繪本 on Facebook.

Ping Pong (《乒 乓》) is a new indie comics anthology featuring works from an up-and-coming generation of Hong Kong comics artists and illustrators. This new generation follows in the footsteps of alternative comics artists like Chihoi (智海) and Siuhak (小克), who grew in fame after the turn of the millennium;…

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Mobile-only design trumps mobile-first on China’s internet

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Kendra (whose writing we previously featured) writes about the state of Chinese web design in 2015 in Smashing Magazine’s On China’s Bleeding Edge: Web Design Trends 2015. Reporting on the advent of responsive, mobile-first design in China, she discovers that companies are instead going for a Wechat-friendly, mobile-only approach. In an interview with Saber Zou, head…

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