A Universal Set of Icons That Mashes Up Chinese and Western Ideas

A visual system designed to express complex cultural nuances, which is meant to be understood by Chinese and Westerners alike.

Visit the hutong neighborhoods in Beijing and you’ll notice a pervasive design paradox: symbols are everywhere, but not there’s not a logo in sight. Stores “normally just use characters and say what they are: Noodle shop, or hair salon,” says Céline Lamée, a designer with Lava Beijing. Signage is straightforward, and, if you can’t read Chinese characters, pretty exclusive. So for this year’s Beijing Design Week, Lamée and her team have been oh-so-slightly changing the graphic design landscape of the hutongs. The aim? Creating a visual system to express complex cultural nuances, which could be understood by Chinese and Westerners alike.

There aren’t many hutongs left in Beijing these days. Many of these traditional neighborhoods, defined by their narrow alleyways and single-story courtyard style houses, have been razed to make way for high rises and slick new modern office buildings. Naturally, the residents of the remaining hutongs want to carefully preserve their streets, even as western influences---Lamée cites bigger cars and new restaurants as some---slowly creep in. There’s a cultural tug-of-war at play.

The graphic designers saw that tension as an opportunity for opening channels of discussion. To get started on In a Simplified World, Lava looked at Chinese characters. “Of course that’s super intriguing, especially for a designer, because you can still see the root of the drawing of where it came from. A tree is simplified over the years, but it still sort of looks like a tree,” Lamée says. “From these Chinese characters, we thought it would be cool if we take those characters and make them understandable in Western languages.”

Using the same graphic elements, Lava illustrated "rich," on the left, and "poor," on the right.

Lava

The final packet of 96 symbols all revolve the cultural themes irking the hutongs. “East, west. Rich, poor. Old and new. These kinds of contradictions that the neighborhood is dealing with,” Lamée. Pairs of symbols that rely on the same graphic elements---a circle, a straight line, and so on---each express one side of that coin. For instance, a rectangle with two circles atop it symbolizes a wallet, for ‘rich,’ while the same rectangle with falling circles signals ‘poor.’ Some icons lean on familiar iconography: an outline of Hello Kitty’s face pairs with Playboy Bunny ears as a play on east and west.

Some make more sense than others: at first glance, it’s hard to see why a division sign stands for ‘public’ when an X-shaped multiplication sign means ‘private.’ To that, Lamée says In a Simplified World is more of an conceptual exercise, than a finished product. “We made these super abstract symbols to let people start a dialogue about how to use the area together.”