Cantonese Children Songs (2022)
GRPH-3011-004 Graphic Design 4 Project
Professor: Lewis Nicholson
As a widely spoken dialect, Cantonese needs to be given more attention and protection. As a beginner, children have a strong ability to imitate and are curious. Therefore, children's songs are beneficial to the transmission and teaching of Cantonese as a medium for their learning and entertainment. Therefore, I chose traditional Cantonese children's songs as my design content. The three nursery rhymes I have chosen are all famous and classic. The lyrics that are familiar to the public are more resonant and empathetic to the listener, and have more local identities.
The entire album packaging including a square tin, a CD, a folded lyric paper brochure, and a brochure about the behind story of the song and the culture.
Inspiration
Through my experience and research, I found that the actual situation of the Cantonese language ismore serious than I thought. As a diverse world, Cantonese is a unique language and culture that needs to be given theappropriate attention and protection.
Language is also the first learning task for human beings exposed to civilized society. The power of language is that it is a bearer of culture. A language is a culture. To communicate in a language is to travel between the history and the present of a culture. The beauty of language is therefore not only the communication of a culture but even more so, the travel of a culture through time and space.
I came up with three ideas and finally I decided to do the fragile one, which is Cantonese album design.
Ideation
Besides the conversations of people around us, another medium for learning language is songs. Children's songs are one of them. Children's songs include not only the teaching of the language but also the culture of the region. Most of the children's songs in Cantonese were formed by the oral tradition of previous generations, and they are mostly storytelling. Each story corresponds to the most real life situation of that era. Therefore, I chose children's songs as my content.
During the pandemic, masks not only blocked the communication of people's expressions, but also hindered the path to learning language by observing mouth movements. Learning language has become more difficult. People could not see the movement of their mouths and facial muscles during the learning process. Hence, I wanted to design a vocal flow chart to depict the movements of the mouth as an aid to language learning.
Challenge
One of the most challenging parts of this project was visualizing a language and its culture. One of the goals of this album design was to give people an idea of the allusions behind the Cantonese language and children’s songs.
Through simple shapes, the mouth patterns of speech are simplified and arranged in my word book so that people can listen to the children’s songs while watching the mouth movements. The storybook, on the other hand, presents the allusions in the children’s songs with an attractive visual effect.
Solution
In the "mask era", learning language has become more difficult. People could not see the movement of their mouths and facial muscles during the learning process. Therefore, I wanted to design a vocal flow chart to depict the movements of the mouth as an aid to language learning. However, since speech involves the movement of the entire facial muscles, it cannot be clearly illustrated with just one diagram. I then used the suggestion given to me by Professor Lewis to record a video of a real mouth talking and put it in. With the video recording, the movements of speech became clearer.
Behind the children's songs are hidden anecdotes of life, and I continued this concept in my lyric paper. I designed to make the story of the song into a small animation and present it in the form of AR. The purpose is to keep the lyric paper simple and clear to show the charm of the words and learn the words better, and to increase the storytelling and fun through the animation presented in AR to realize the interaction between words and people. To better narrate the stories behind the songs, I created a booklet detailing the details and sources in the stories. By using different color mixing patterns, the emotion of the text is conveyed to the reader through the photos.
One of the moods in the project is nostalgia, so the design will use objects from the past or a way of life from the past. In the past, when electronic information was not too developed, letters were the communication tool that everyone had the most contact with. Nowadays, in the 5G era, the space-time distance between all messages is infinitely shortened, making it difficult to feel the pleasure of waiting. Designing the packaging as envelopes and iron boxes express the nostalgic feelings more profoundly. In the constrained living environment of the past, discarded food iron boxes were often used as storage boxes for further use.
So to say, the package design regards the children's song as a time capsule buried in the past, and when opening the package it is like meeting with people and events from the past again and renewing the previous relationship. Showing the past makes young people aware of the history of dialect and regional culture.
TOUCH TOUCH
Envelop Cover
(Album Cover)
Envelop Back
(Album Back)
Selected AR (Augmented Reality) GIFs
Click here to see all the GIFs:
HEAVY RAINING
Envelop Cover
(Album Cover)
Envelop Back
(Album Back)
Selected AR (Augmented Reality) GIFs
Click here to see all the GIFs:
SPINNING AROUND
Envelop Cover
(Album Cover)
Envelop Back
(Album Back)
Selected AR (Augmented Reality) GIFs
Click here to see all the GIFs:
Handmade Models
I used modeling clay to pinch the content of the lyrics and used it as my material to make animated GIFs related to the content of the lyrics, just like a small story. These animations are finally shown as AR.
For the content of the model, I referred to the children's drawing sand imitated their simple abstract style to complete the model and illustrations. This style is more in line with the theme of the children's song and adds fun.
Tools
Adobe InDesign
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
