ZODIAC TYPOGRAPHY

Project Overview

The convergence of Eastern and Western Culture is now a very trending topic in this era of globalization. It also plays a big role in the communication between different countries. At the same time, since I was always interested in the relationship between different cultures and curious about how they would interact with each other, it naturally became the topic of my thesis project.

This series of typography and pattern design is aiming to facilitate better understanding of different cultures via the language of Chinese and English. To start with, I chose the Traditional Zodiac which represents Chinese year calendar to be the subject, as it's becoming more and more popular and recognizable across the world. The visuals of the zodiac were designed in the combination of Chinese characters and English letters. At a glance, they were just Chinese characters with styles, while every single component inside the character is an English letter from the word for this animal. The different styles of the twelve visuals are decided based on the meaning of the animals in both cultures.

This is only a small step starting the journey of helping people from western culture better understand Chinese culture through language in a fun way. Apart from the Zodiac pattern itself, a lot of cultural and time-based derivations are also designed based on them.