DESIGN NAME: Chinese History Infographic Book
PRIMARY FUNCTION: Infographic Book
INSPIRATION: The idea came from a research project in the college history class: there were so many written papers about Chinese history, but there was no infographic presenting the history in a visual way.
Inspired by traditional Chinese landscape paintings, the project intends to present the beauty of history as an artwork, which goes beyond line graphs and bubble maps.
UNIQUE PROPERTIES / PROJECT DESCRIPTION: This book is a new information system visualizing 5000 Years of Chinese history. By analyzing the outstanding historical contributions, including politics, philosophy, arts, science and technology, the book visually presents the relationships among those realms.
The traditional watercolor painting is an artistic visualization based on the real history data, which represents the history in an authentic and expressive way.
OPERATION / FLOW / INTERACTION: The three parts of the book (top, middle, and bottom) can be open and fold individually.
Readers can experience the full context of history by spreading out the book to be a long piece painting, or just focus on a specific period by opening the page of that dynasty.
PROJECT DURATION AND LOCATION: The project's first version is designed in 2011 and later exhibited in First China University Book Design Exhibition in Beijing. The book's second version has been revised and made in 2014.
FITS BEST INTO CATEGORY: Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design
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PRODUCTION / REALIZATION TECHNOLOGY: The book contains three parts. The main body of the book is a traditional painting visualization, which is based on the other two infographics.
The top infographic presents the chronology of ancient Chinese history based on over 800 emperors in 24 dynasties; the bottom part highlights over 200 famous scholars in philosophy, literature, art, science and technology following the same timeline.
SPECIFICATIONS / TECHNICAL PROPERTIES: The book’s fold size is 140 mm width x 35 mm depth x 400 mm height.
The expanded size is 3640 mm width x 800 mm height.
The book contains 26 pages in each section. The top's and bottom's page sizes are 140 mm width x 190 mm height. The main body's page size is 140 mm width x 400 mm height.
TAGS: infographic, book, China, History, Visualization, Culture
RESEARCH ABSTRACT: The research process took more than one year. Collected from the research in the field of ancient Chinese history, the main storyline follows the chronology of its 24 dynasties. Additionally, the project's details have been developed by analyzing academic papers focusing on each dynasty.
CHALLENGE: There are three challenges of this project: 1.collecting and sorting the vast amount of historical data; 2. building a structure that can present the relationships among multiple knowledge areas; 3. transforming the abstract structure to an artistic traditional Chinese painting framework
ADDED DATE: 2017-02-21 05:55:45
TEAM MEMBERS (1) :
IMAGE CREDITS: Yanwen Hu, 2011-2017
PATENTS/COPYRIGHTS: Copyright belong to Yanwen Hu, 2011/2017
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