Parsons challenge 1: Passionate rain on a freshly tarred road

To all the workers of Formosa:

Your life is short but meaningful.

Thank you for the future you built for us, and

Have Fun at the Goddamned Playground.

On a hot summers day, the road constructors spread boiling tar onto the roads, flatten them with machines, and wait for the afternoon thundershower to cool the roads. When the rain touches the surface of hot tar, it immediately evaporates, hissing and sizzling. The road is like the workers’ playground, magnificent and inspiring.

The sun is roaring relentlessly above our heads. It is time to pave the future.

Spread fresh tar onto the scarred past, fill up its wounds of sorrow.

The heat of hot tar nibbles away may rubber boots. I can feel them melting beneath my feet. The color of tar is as dark as death, and I am walking on a deadly road of chewing gum that drags me down to the eighteenth level of hell.

An afternoon thundershower is approaching. I can feel the suffocating air wrap her warm body onto mine, and whisper into my ear: “now, we wait for the sign.” And then all of a sudden, tears of heaven charge passionately onto the boiling strip of death. Hot steam shrieks furiously.

We are in the midst of war.

With the iron tank car, press the enemy down to where it came form. Flatten them with our stubborn will.

Press on, press on.
We are masterminds of the future,
the children at the barren playground.

Parsons challenge 2: Dying eternity on an eroding steel bar

I photographed this image at a worn-out and abandoned construction site. And I thought of how dozens of workers once toiled over this piece of land, only to have their hard work forsaken. Because of the typhoons and extreme weather conditions that have been going on in the past few years, the exposed construction was barely there; only a few remains of past glories were left. This strip of steel bar was one of them. It was exhilarating to see how the acid rain left its beautiful yet tragic marks on the piece of steel. The striking orange pattern resulted from erosion, and would soon cause the steel bar to break. The construction site is a dying playground, while the youth of the hardworking laborers are eaten away.

The soul of the workers is as tough as steel. However, time is a strong acid.

You always knew that life does not last, but you though your work could live on.

You pampered the city with the best steel bars, and hammered your muscles like a twenty-four-seven machine.

But as you know, time is a strong acid.

The sun is unforgiving, the rain is sarcastic, and the people mind their own business.

You think you are the child king at the playground, who builds his castle at the sandbox. But beware of the setting sun. Your youth is crumbling away, because time is a strong acid.

Parsons challenge 3: Fragile dreams on a bamboo scaffold

At many construction sites in Taiwan, scaffolds are made of bamboo, and secured with green nylon nets. Many tragic accidents happened at the construction site, where laborers fell from the scaffolds. I photographed this image from beneath a building to capture the scaffold against the blue sky, thinking how this image somehow symbolized dreams, ideals, and the future. And then I thought of how ironic it was that workers climbing scaffolds resembled children dangling on monkey bars at the playground. The image made me understand how life is short, and how dreams are illusive and fragile. The lives of the workers are as delicate as those of children, and the workers risk their lives in the playground of reality.

My fiend died in an accident yesterday. He fell from a bamboo scaffold.

I was there.

I watched him climb higher and higher into the sky, and his smile was as blinding and proud as the sun above our heads.

Upon his deathbed, he told me that life was like climbing a monkey bar

—You climb, you fall, and you climb up again.

But I thought I’ve told him a thousand times: “life is nothing like that.”

Life is but a fragile dream. All of a sudden you hear a shatter, and you wake up in a blank space of nothingness.

My friend sighed his last sigh on earth and told me to carve these words onto his stone grave:

“Have Fun at the Goddamned Playground.”

1. Card Game Design: Paradise Burp

Paradise Burp is a card game that addresses the message of “healthy eating”. The game is inspired by the wide variety of traditional delicacies seen in Taiwanese night markets, and includes 90 food cards in color along with 20 black-and-white attack cards. The food cards are composed of 6 nutrient categories distinguished by 6 colors, and the healthiness of the food cards is graded by Health Value numbers, which is indicated by the level of color value.

2. Editorial Design: Spectrum of Words

Spectrum of Words is a personal self-introduction poster designed in the form of information design. It is an editorial piece that illustrates the designer’s experience in reading, and how word in literature colors a person’s life.

The self-introduction is demonstrated in a square graph. The x-axis defines the rhythm of words while the y-axis defines the flux of time. Thus the two-dimensional space establishes a growing spectrum composed of words. Horizontally, the successive words, sentences or text blocks in the graph form curve lines that expresses the reader’s emotional wave when reading. Vertically, the 6 text spectrums and their corresponding curve lines represent 6individual reading experiences, which gradually transform from basic word to novels. As the years progress, the texts spectrums become more colorful while the overlapping and intertwining of texts become more vivacious. Also, different font-faces are used in order to express the different atmospheres of reading.

3. Editorial Design: Project Rockwell

Project Rockwell is an editorial piece combining typography and photography. The idea was to design an advertisement spread for a typeface, using photographic images as the main material which voices a general concept. The photographs should express the tone and style of the typeface, and also provide a personal outlook of type and life.

The designer chose the slab-serif Rockwell as the subject and used multi-colored pastels to build a letter and photographed it. The idea was that the cubic pastels convey the structural yet playful aspect of the Rockwell font, and that typography is an art in everyday life.

4. Logo Design: Dean & Designers

Dean & Designers, INC—a Taiwanese brand for furniture and household goods—needed an identity system before launch their products. The company was aiming for high-end furniture design, and expects to build an international fashion brand that expresses “eastern modernity”, and thus the designer came up with the idea of combining the old and the new.

The word “Dean” is a transliteration of a Chinese character that represents a three-legged Chinese bronze ware popular during the Three Dynasties. To combine the oriental style with modernity in the logo, the designer merged the two initial Ds of the company name with the pattern and color of Chinese bronze ware. In addition, both the logo and logotype have a firm build that denotes the structural aspect of furniture design.

5. Logo Design: Inn Media

6. Poster Design: The Dance of String

The Dance of String poster was designed for an erhu concert. The erhu, also known as the “Chinese violin”, is a traditional Chinese bowed string instrument that generates sound by rubbing a horse-hair bow against two iron strings.

The poster was commissioned by the two woman string players, who wanted a design that expressed their music and the concert title: “The Dance of String.” Therefore, the designer decided to create a poster that conveys “string” and “rhythm”. The main material used for making images was the horse hair on the bow. After positioning the horse-hair bow string and scanning it into the computer, the designer was able to play with the images and produced a bluish image of dancing strings which not only correspond to the concert title, but also voiced the feminine and melancholic music of the erhu.

7. Poster Design: The Image of Los Angeles

The Image of Los Angeles was assigned as a practice for understanding a city culture that you are not familiar with, and expressing it graphically. In other words, the poster had to convey the spirit of a city. After some research, the designer found that music is an important element of the culture, and that many rock bands derived from this city, and their music produced in the iconic Capitol Records building. To convey the wildness of rock culture and its relation to the Los Angeles, the designer combined the image of Capital Records with cymbals— a crucial instrument in rock— by stack up cymbals discs to simulates the distinctive structure of the building. The crimson background color responds to the hallucinating and extravagant tone of rock, and also reflects the designer’s general impression of LA.

8. Package Design: Freshland Moutwash

9. Photography: Symphony in Action

The theme of Symphony in Action is the visual representation of music. In this photography series, the designer captured the conductor’s body language through the camera in order to communicate music. The idea was that the body language composed graphic signs that express musicality in the form of images. In order to place the focus on the body language in the photographs, the designer decided to go for a noir style for the photos, shooting the subject against a dark background. The outcome was a set of high brightness contrast photos in which the hand and the facial expression of the model was highlighted, resulting in a flux of hand movements in a photo sequence which accordingly conveyed the dynamics and rhythm in music.

10. Photography: Rabbit Blues

11. Illustration: Broken Orchids

As the title suggests, the theme of Broken Orchids is deconstruction. The project was about breaking the rigid form of the ordinary and the concrete in order to rediscover the possibilities in the unusual and the abstract.

Thus, after analyzing the elements and details of the orchids, the designer took apart its elements and tried to capture the essence of the subject. The orchids went through deconstruction and were recreated with ink and charcoal. The idea was that deconstruction is liberation, and in order to free the subject, ink is sprayed onto the paper, rather being controlled by brush strokes.

12.Illustration: Space

The assignment of Space was to design a conceptual spaceship along with its environment. The illustration required a general concept that can be graphically applied as elements of the design. The work was inspired by the idea of organism, which is to say the spaceship along with its imaginary space environment is designed based on organic elements such as DNA, cells and sea life derived from the natural habitat on earth. The general structure of the spaceship takes the form of the human figure. The man holds one eye in its hand, reaching out in search of life. The story within the illustration is about the isolation in space, about men’s aspiration for life, and also about evolution that results from the human urge to survive.