brands looking

Actually, there are different types of British brands set up in Hong Kong and most of them are the fashion brands. Many travelers come to Hong Kong for shopping because Hong Kong is a "Tax-free" city. Therefore, a lot of British brands such as Mark & Spencer, BURBERRY, Clarks, etc. However, their logos were still in English without using a translated one.

Therefore, this forced me to rebrand a translated logo for British brands in Hong Kong.

Outcome idea

Simply, I want to create something related to the research brief theme (manga). Therefore, I will illustrate some Japanese anime characters and make something similar to storyboard/manga as 3X A3 poster in order to present what I have found over the research. This is a really amazing idea because even though there is no story behind but I can create something similar to the Japanese manga which is a really good experience.

Things about the design
-Only the first frame is in colour mode (Refer to typical Japanese manga, only a few pages are in colour mode).
-Try to avoid putting too much text
-More illustrated characters.

In the beginning, I printed on the recycling paper because it looks more similar to the paper of manga book, however, it couldn't work well as a poster because it is too thin. Therefore, I used another paper (Matt thick card).

Brief Intro

Due to the fact that Hong Kong is an international place, a lot of international brands also set up their brands in Hong Kong, however, they didn't really make a translated version of logos even though in Hong Kong, they just kept the original one even though most of the brands have traditional Chinese translation.

Therefore, I want to use the things that I have learned from COP3 and develop more. I will choose a British brand that also did in Hong Kong and re-brand their logo in traditional Chinese characters in order to fit the market.

This is one of my small briefs, probably, I will use a week to complete this simple project.

Aim of this brief:
-As I didn't really have enough opportunity to rebrand or design a logo in traditional Chinese characters by using different categories so I want to take this as a chance to practice.
-When I was in Hong Kong, I saw a lot of international brands, but most of them were in English so I think if they can do a translation, it seems more friendly.

Evaluation

Studying manga course in Japan is one of my wishes after graduate when I was young, I travelled to Tokyo several times because it is really close to Hong Kong, only takes around 3 hours flight. I really like the culture, environment, and shops in Japan, especially the anime industry. They often organize some festival related to Japanese animation, also their animations or manga can buy/show in Hong Kong easily. Therefore, it forced me to be a Japanese anime fan.

How it related to graphic design?
Actually, I think it doesn't matter that I study graphic design and want to work in the anime industry because graphic design is also about "Communication" so I think the most important thing is how/what can I make to attract viewers, for example, the cover, anime posters, etc.

Why study in Japan instead of Hong Kong?
It is true that I am from Hong Kong, however, I don't really like the teaching system in Hong Kong because it is too competitive and pressured, when I was in primary and high-school in Hong Kong, the school pushed us every day, it is quite similar even though in university.
Therefore, I want to try studying in other Asia countries especially Korea and Japan because both countries, the design industry is really inspired to me, for Korea, it is fashion and Japan is anime.

Though this research brief, it gives me more information about studying manga course in Japan, like what typically do they teach. Even though I am not sure if I can really study in Japan in the future, at least I got some really useful information which is helpful for me to plan.

Additional information to help to study aboard in Japan

It is true that studying aboard should learn the language that the country use. As it is important no matter in study life or daily life. Hence, I also looked at some Japanese language school where they provide Japanese language courses.

Tokyo Central Japanese Language School
Short-term International Course (from 3 months *10 weeks)

I personally prefer learning Japanese with a short term course because as most manga school also provides Japanese language courses during the manga course. Hence, I can learn the basic of Japanese language in the short course. Also, I am learning Japanese from my Japanese friends and animations which helped me a lot.

The short-term international course is a three-month course aimed at students who are visiting Japan on a temporary visitor or working holiday visa. The course covers a good balance of the four basic Japanese language abilities (speaking, listening, reading, writing), aiming to provide students with a practical level of Japanese ability for use in society.


Fee:172,800 yen (tax included)

April Term
Placement test:April 5 (Tue), April 6 (Wed), April 7 (Thurs)
Enrollment ceremony:April 8 (Fri)
Start Date:April 11 (Mon)

July Term
Placement test:July 4 (Mon), July 5 (Tue)
Enrollment ceremony:July 6
Start Date:July 7 (Thurs)

October Term
Placement test:October 4 (Tue), October 5 (Wed)
Enrollment ceremony:October 7 (Fri)
Start Date:October 11 (Tue)

January Term (2017)
Placement test:January 6 (Wed)
Enrollment ceremony:January 10 (Tue)
Start Date:January 12 (Thurs)

Address: 34 Shinanomachi, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
Contact number:+81-3-3354-5001

Tokyo Animation College

Tokyo Animation College is a school that has 4 departments and 8 different courses to help to cultivate potential professionals. I looked at their website and I found a course that I am really interesting on which is "Character design course".

It is a two years course so not too long actually. The Character Design industry is an expanding industry. It includes designing characters in a novel, or illustrations within the book or on the cover which fits my graphic design skills. In the course, students will be trained to handle a wide range of designs for characters such as designing character merchandise. Moreover, they will have the opportunity to learn how to make use of digital technology such as using coloring materials and acquire skills to design web-pages, and discover the fields that most suit to the student such as advertisement, publication, character-merchandising, and games.

Curriculum:

Address: 1-1-8 Shimoochiai Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 161-0033 Japan

Contact number:+81 (0)3-5332-3056

Fax:+81 (0)3-5332-3059

Email:info@tokyo-anime.jp

NIHON KOGAKUIN COLLEGE

Nihon Kougakuin is one of Japan’s top animation, design, and CG vocational colleges. With 7 faculties boasting over 35 departments of studies, a student has many choices when it comes to major in what they are most interested in.

The school employs top talent from various industries as instructors for students. This means that students get excellent quality instruction from teachers that are already extremely well known. For example, the animator of Pikachu is a regular instructor in the character creation and animation departments.

They offer multiple majors in animation creation, manga creation, character design, and anime CG. In this department, students can learn to animate, create and produce their own animation or manga. Depending on the student's major, they will also learn about the inner workings and business side of the animation industry in Japan.

Length of the course:24 months
Fee:¥2,625,690 in total
Address:5-chōme-5-23-22 Nishikamata, 大田区 Ota City, Tōkyō-to 144-0051
Contact number: 03-3732-1071

Kudan and Mangajuku!(Professional Manga School)

This is a perfect course for international students because students can learn both Japanese and Manga during their short stay of 3 months in Japan.

Kudan Institute of Japanese Culture is a Japanese language school, but they also provide different courses apart from the Japanese language. One of the courses I looked at is Manga(Comic) course.

This course is completely original and is a special course made for those interested in Japanese manga, In this course, a professional manga artist together with a bilingual coordinator will assist student according to their level, and whether they are someone who likes reading manga but is a complete beginner in drawing, or for those who are experts at drawing but would like to broaden their expertise, students can be assured that students of any level can take the course.

The course has already produced more than 100 student graduates from 37 different countries. While studying Japanese language, students learn how to draw manga characters, and they would be able to create an original character of their own. At the end of this course, along with the Certificate of Completion, students will also receive their works and a manga sketching textbook.

Course details:

Basically, the student can choose the duration of the course by themselves whether 1 month, 2 months or 3 months.

Address:
日本〒101-0061 Tōkyō-to, Chiyoda City, Misakichō, 2-chōme−7−１０ 帝都三崎町ビル
Contact number: +81 3-3239-7923

Graduate School of Manga: Master’s Program in Kyoto Seika University

The curriculum for the Graduate School of Manga’s Master’s Program features Special Lecture Classes such as the Manga Theory Special Lecture and the Manga Discipline Special Lecture, training the ability to consider manga from different ways. Also, the Specialized Research Classes aim to help scholars establish students own stance and attitude towards manga. They mainly focus on research.

For the Special Lecture Classes, they divided into five parts:

1. Manga Theory Special Lecture-Introduces previous research fields from semiology, the history of ideas, gender theory, and also fan culture research. Verifies the special characteristics of manga due to historical backgrounds, and social and cultural contexts, and re-considers the field from global perspectives.
2. Manga Discipline Special Lecture1-Based on recent manga research that places emphasis on reader theory, issues of manga “authorship” will be illuminated.
3. Manga Discipline Special Lecture 2-This class looks at essential foundation knowledge in animation research and its connections with manga and associated media.
4. Manga Discipline Special Lecture 3-Studies the necessary methods of gathering and sorting information in order to conduct social historical survey research in the manga.
5. Manga Discipline Special Lecture 4-Considers the growth of the content business into an important commercial industry through changes in the needs of people and the progress of mobile phone technology. 

For the Specialist Research Classes, they divided into ten parts:

1. Manga Research 1-In the Meaning and Expression of Story Manga Work, in order to consider the relationship between meaning and expression in a completed story manga.
2. Manga Research 1 (Theory)-Considers manga and the various means of its research through reports by scholars on reference literature.
3. Manga Research 2-In Experiments in Online Manga, scholars examine the presentation of manga on the World Wide Web and concurrently actually produce their own works.
4. Manga Research 2 (Theory)-Considers various academic theories and how they can be applied to manga research, including representation, linguistic analysis, media theory, cultural history, and comparative culture, cultural studies, contemporary society, and commerce.
5. Manga Research 3 (Story Manga)-Through production work, scholars deepen student's thinking as regards manga themes and methodologies and produce research dissertations and manga work that can objectively present findings.
6. Manga Research 3 (Cartoon)-Moving one step on from existing satire, scholars work to establish own individual styles.
7. Manga Research 3 (Theory)- Scholars acquire writing ability beyond academic dissertations, through creating manga synopses.
8. Manga Research 4 (Story Manga)-Following on from the Manga Research 3, at tutorial staff seminars scholars discuss planned graduation exhibition works.
9. Manga Research 4 (Cartoon)-Aims to create work reflecting artist identity appropriate for final graduation artwork. 
10. Manga Research 4 (Theory)-Focuses mainly on creating the final Master’s thesis but, in addition to individual tutoring, also utilizes graduate student discussion as a site for mutual criticism.

Generally, I think this course is more focusing on theory instead of design skill, characters design, etc. Hence, I think it will be really useful for being a manga/anime designer.

Kyoto Seika University Details:
Address / Contact
Kyoto Seika International Office 
137 Kino-cho, Iwakura, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8588 JAPAN
Tel: [+81] 75 702 5199
Fax: [+81] 75 702 5390

Email: ksuinted@kyoto-seika.ac.jp

Why do I want to study in Japan?

It is true that Japan is one of the most successful countries to produce animation/manga. Therefore, the industry in Japan is always better than in other countries. The character drawing style is quite unique which I did in the last research brief, I really like the style of the animation and manga no matter the characters or the background.

Japan is an increasingly popular and attractive destination for students. As of May 1, 2010, there were about 140,000 foreign students in Japan. The Japanese government is expecting that number to increase in the near future, to 300,000 by the year 2020.

How can it related to graphic design??
As Japanese animation and manga are famous over the world so there is a lot of advertising works for each anime or manga, for example, characters posters. Hence, I want to learn from it and apply it to my graphic design practice. Perhaps, in Asia, Japanese animation and manga are very popular no matter comic books, animation, magazine, movies, etc. Therefore, they all need graphic designers in order to promote their anime. Being an Asian, it gives more chance to me to get the job easier.

Apart from that, as Japan is really close to Hong Kong and the culture is quite similar, for example, the environment, food, etc. Therefore, I am already getting used to it. During some big festival/holiday such as Christmas or Lunar New Year, I can go back to Hong Kong easily to meet my family and friends. During my life in the UK, I can only go back once during summer because of the long distance and high fee. Hence, I want to study in Japan if possible.

University courses in Japan related to Japanese anime brief intro

The reason that I am doing this as one of my research briefs is that I think it will be really helpful and a great chance for me to get more information about university in Japan that have courses related to Japanese anime style of illustration/animation.

In the last research brief, I mentioned that I am a huge fan of Japanese animation/manga, hence, I want to study courses related to it in Japan after I graduate. Therefore, this is a great platform for me to do some research on this so that I can make the plan better. No matter I will be successful to study in Japan or not, I can do a useful research for my future.

Basically, in this brief, I will find some university/school/college that provides manga courses and look at their details.

Bus stop mock up

Bus stop is a good platform to display our design to viewers.

Evaluation

Overall, I really enjoyed working on this brief because the outputs are really effective which helps to encourage/reminds the public to watch the Tokyo 2020 Olympic. During the brief, we were struggled about what could we make as a campaign. The redesigned pictograms were the core of the whole campaign because we used it as our starting point to develop our further designs. If I have more time working on this project, I want to try just using rhombus to make all pictograms because I also used some other geometric shapes in this time as some movement/action were really difficult to make, for example, sailing. Hence, if I have extra time, I will try to make them better.

I am happy to work with Sadie, she helped me a lot during the brief. It gave me a great experience to work as a team because I don’t usually work as a team, I mainly just worked independently, therefore, I always feel struggling to work as a team, however, this time was a lot better.

Final Designs

We really like the final outcomes, they worked like a full campaign to celebrate the Tokyo 2020 Olympic coming. Especially the idea of redesign the pictograms with chequered patterns, the output made our works more connected to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic.

London Underground advertisement

Basically, this is just a mock-up to show our campaign to general public. Due to the fact that we think displaying our campaign through the screen AD may works well.

I remembered last year I did a workshop about using "Timeline" in photoshop to make a simple animation, I think it could be really helpful in this project so I used this technique that I have learnt from last year to create a simple animation.

I used "frame animation" because it would be easier to create animation that doesn't has a lot of movement. However, when I showed my first version during the crit, most people said it looks too fast per each frame, it was 0.5 second per each frame. Therefore, I slowed down each frame a litte bit into 1.0 second per each frame.

Idea development

When I considered about which colours to apply to my design, my partner helped me to design a new style of the Olympic rings so that it looks more unique instead of just copying the same Olympic rings. She experimented different "rings" with the Olympic colours, I really like the outcome of the Olympic rings, it looks unique but people can definitely recognize it is the Olympic rings.

Basically, she created the Olympic rings from objects around the studio, she began looking at surroundings and things that could be used as rings. From this she used paint and imprinted some objects of circles, moving to create one using just a paint brush. This method of a single clean sweeping motion reminded her of work she has done previously looking into artists such as Robert Motherwell and ensō. Ensō is a Japanese word meaning circle, it is associated with Zen and Buddhism.

It’s Japanese roots and ideals such as unity and movement connected to it, she thought it would work well for this project. While watercolour paint would provide a smooth outcome that would easily be transferable to digital. Using acrylic paint would have created too much relief from the surface and excess paint that’s wouldn’t be seen in the end product and oil paint would have taken too long to dry. She decided to use watercolour as well to the similar properties it shares within that is most commonly used, but provided more colours she could easily work with. Each circle was painted separately as when painted together the colour would merge and didn’t create the clean look that we wanted to achieve.

I scanned the rings into digitally in order to develop our posters. Simply, I wanted to use it with the Tokyo 2020 Olympic blue so that everything is more connected. Instead of adding too much text on the posters, we decided not to add much text on the posters so that it is straightforward and simple as our main purpose is to tell/ reminds people about the Tokyo 2020 Olympic so not much text is needed.

I was considered about adding the title "Tokyo 2020 Olympic", while, it doesn't look effective on this design. Hence, I looked back to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic logo and I wanted to include chequered patterns design on it.

The result works much better than the previous one, I used "Alte DIN 1451 Mittelschr" on the text "Tokyo 2020" because it is the same as the typeface that they used on their logo. The new designed rings worked really well with the chequered patterns design, it looks contemporary.

Instead of the "rings" poster, I also created some posters that work with those pictograms that I redesigned. Basically, I also used the Tokyo 2020 Olympic blue, while, I also tried to work with five Olympic rings colours. At the first stage, I was unsure whether I should use the text under the pictogram or not. During the crit, some people suggested me to do it, I tried it, however, I personally still prefer not to put text under the pictogram as it looks more effective.

Initial Ideas

Due to the fact that adults have to work even though in the summer, therefore, they always missed the time to watch the live on tv. Hence, I was thinking to design a simple schedule list for them in order to remind them which date the event is. When I did the research, I found the online schedule on the official website, while I think it is difficult to remember the date that which sports belong to.

Unfortunately, when I worked on the schedule, it wasn't able to finish all because when I finished some and I already know the completed one would be really messy because there are a lot of sports events and all of them takes at least one day. However, as this is the schedule so all content should be included but the fact is the final outcome must be really messy if include all details. Therefore, I gave up this idea of creating a schedule list.

I also tried to make multi colours version of the redesigned pictograms by the Olympic colours, however, it doesn't look good and doesn't match with the whole campaign so I gave this idea up.

Colour consideration

Instead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic blue, we have to think some other colours to work on our designs. Therefore, we wanted to use some colours that is related to Olympic and meaningful. As the result, we decided to try working with the Olympic rings colours because there are five different colours and each represent different areas so we think it would be meaningful to try working on those colours.

At the beginning, I tried to add some gradation on those colours, however, it doesn't look good and effective. While, single tone works the best so we decided to just work with single tone colours. 

Pictograms redesign

Simply, I looked at different Olympic pictograms as inspiration but mainly focusing on the 2020 Tokyo Olympic pictograms to develop. One that I like the most is the 2008 Beijing Olympic pictograms, it worked really well because the pictograms look like the Chinese calligraphy which displayed a Chinese culture through the pictograms in an international event.

Therefore, I tried to design something based on the chequered patterns and other geometric shapes with the unique blue that used on the Tokyo 2020 Olympic logo.

On the sketches, I used the rhombus as the head because it is the same objects that appeared on the original designs.

The most difficult part to make a decision was whether using the blue with outline only or fill in the whole pictograms. It is true that the one filled in work better because it makes the viewer easier to understand. Hence, I developed my design with this decision.

In a total of 33 sports and some contains more such as aquatics.