Kaiping Diaolou — Norman's Portfolio

Kaiping Diaolou and Villages

Graphic Design • Printing • Campaign

For my Graphic Design Synthesis course, we had to do a semester-long project on a UNESCO World Heritage Site of our choosing. I wanted to do my project on the Kaiping Diaolou and Villages, a World Heritage Site in Guangdong, China. For this project, I created a whole identity system along side stationery, advertisements, a booklet, a website landing page, and an onsite sign with 6 UN official languages.

Background Research

The Kaiping Diaolou (Watchtowers) and Villages are a region based in Guangzhou, China. They are multistory towers usually in the rural villages of the region. These towers have 3 main usages, depending on who they were built by; communal towers used by several families for refuge, residential towers used by wealthy families as fortified residents, and as watchtowers to look over the villages. Many of these towers rose up during the Ming dynasty as a response to the banditry in the local area.

Making an Identity

One of the first things while creating a mark for the project was to research the site as well as sketch some ideas onto paper. After playing with ideas of architectural patterns, I settled on a pattern of fencing with a classic Chinese Knot motif. The Chinese knot was striking and helped represent the duality of the Kaiping Diaolous as both Eastern and Western architecture.

Branding Choices

After creating the initial idea of a mark, I fleshed out the other branding elements, such as color palette, typefaces, and a fifth element.

I wanted to highlight in the mark and branding the collaboration between China and Western architecture and the cultural fusion between the two. The colors I wanted to use were a beige that was common on the Diaolou, as well as the red and yellow accent colors found on many different buildings in villages and Diaolou, found on the windows, doors, and lamps.