Zijing Zhong The Journey is the Reward

How can graphic design be used to explore the model of story creations through texts and images?

The story is everything that people with different identities shaped in changing time and space. Their old and new identities, the inner world of the characters in stories, the psychological impact of experiences, and the fact that people with different identities will have diverse narratives. Centred on the story, related works in the subject areas of literature, painting, and film are valuable samples of those existing narratives as well as genre systems and representations. Furthermore, exploring people’s stories and discovering the philosophical or social meanings behind them that can be learned from the study of narrative.

It is vital to read the history and development of narrative, thinking about those appealing stories in literature, painting, and film, how all kinds of mediums were used by the storytellers, and finally looking at representations in contemporary times. Meanwhile, it is more important to discuss how people with different identities understand stories differently, and how the characters in stories can motivate people to understand themselves. Nothing is more fascinating than discovering people, especially the audiences, how they achieve communication between a character in the virtual world and their egos in the present through the stories in graphic design works.

The roots of different understandings of narrative could be family, education, age, gender, personal experience, and other possible factors. Therefore, the narratives may lead to the difference in many poeple’s understanding and impact. As an artist and designer, it is very worthwhile to establish connections between the audiences themselves and society through stories in graphic design works, and other developing artworks.

In addition, the story reflects on the relationship between itself and people’s worldviews through the lens of writer Robert McKee, provoking questions about whether genre systems and representations are a design language in graphic design, bringing this kind of design language to bear on the related creations of graphic design.

Finally, narrative has a great impact on people’s understanding of themselves. This may be a discoverable area related to the research questions on story. The project seeks to answer them by studying the stories, rewriting them, and creating new stories in the changing time and space, eventually using appropriate materials or mediums of narrative, in graphic design, finding philosophical connections.

L’Ingénu (figure 1), which is a fine art work created by Zijing, that has been moving forward at the RCA (figure 2). It continues to be relevant to the direction and keywords of Zijing’s research today. [A]MAZE has included its continued works, Bandages Experiments III: Tasting and Melting.

Between Worlds, an experimental graphic design work largely used texts and images that tells Zijing’s stories from his private social media (figure 3).

Can You See Her is an experimental work of text and image, made in collaboration with Garance Paule Querleu, it was shown by Zijing in a RCA MRes Across Pathway course (figure 4).

Get the Blossom I Have Ever Bleed (Huadao in Chinese), is a milestone of Zijing’s research and practice within graphic design (figure 5). His current research interests, such as texts and images, stories, and emotions, originated from this work.

Allium Cepa, a theoretical work centred on Zijing’s sketch book (figure 6).

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Labna Fernandez

Labna Fernandez is a Mexican biologist, who graduated from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in 2022 with a final project about molecular microbiology. She is interested in the history of how science has been publicly communicated. She has presented several science communication projects both nationally (in Mexico City and Durango) and internationally (in Luxembourg). Labna has a strong social commitment, which informs her research. Her current research interests are in the gender bias in how scientific narratives are constructed and the effects of this on female representation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects. For her master’s degree, the Royal Society is her research focus and involves exploring how it has publicised itself and uncovering its bias mechanisms.

A practising graphic designer, Zihan Li grew up in China and took professional graphic design training at the University of Utah in the United States. His cross-cultural experience has shaped his identity, in the forms of both verbal and visual languages. He is deeply interested in the historically rich Chinese culture, yet appreciates the contemporary artistic styles commonly seen in the western world.

His research focuses on visual communication and culture, especially in typography and symbolism. Currently, his research goal is to discover a new style of expression in graphic design based on traditional Chinese elements.

Sylvia (Zhiping) Xiao wonders about the world. She wonders how the world functions in general. She wonders about how things come to exist and why they don’t. Specifically, she is interested in how we misunderstand each other. To understand how people make decisions and what creates our daily physical life, Sylvia studied Product Design and graduated as the valedictorian at Art Center College of Design in California for her bachelor’s degree. With all her making and designing skills, as well as an overview of the industrial product world that she acquired there, Sylvia is now expanding into a more abstract and theoretical realm.

Lifei Shan is a graphic designer, and her study project focuses on the impact of kinetic typography design on audiences at RCA. Between 2018–21, Lifei was a postgraduate student at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, with a research focus on the theory and research of font design. During this period, she participated in a National Teaching Research Project – Zhihuishu Mooc-Font Design in 2019. She also created an animated text design on Chinese verbs, focusing on rhythm, and wrote an article, ‘The Visual Rhythm of Animated Text’ (Tianjin, 2021) based on the project. She is currently creating kinetic typography and working on the topic of the emotional communication of interactive kinetic typography on audiences in immersive environments.

Yixin Zhang is an observer and a designer who previously studied social sciences, fine arts, and art histories during her undergraduate period in Canada, and is currently practising in design. This diverse academic background has naturally led her to an interdisciplinary making journey, and she is working across visual communication design, photography, sculpture, installation, and video.

The enduring questions in the field of communication design fascinate her. In particular, the curiosity of how communication as a tool shapes and is shaped by humans, has informed her research interest in the exploration of how to overthrow the conventions structured through the means of visual persuasion.

Fan Zhang is an artist, designer and researcher who was born in China in 2000, currently based in London. Before she joined the RCA MRes Communication Design, Fan Zhang completed her foundation and the first year of her bachelor's degree at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, in 2018. She then moved to London and completed her bachelor’s degree in Graphic and Media Design at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, in 2022. During this time, she became increasingly curious about speculative design, sounds, philosophy, and generative arts, which provided her with considerable inspiration for creation. Multicultural shocks and life experiences in foreign countries enliven her investigation of communication by using interdisciplinary methods.

Zhengyi Wei

Zhenyi Wei is a communication designer who graduated from Jiangnan University in China with her undergraduate studies in visual communication design as her main field of study. Based on her interest in communication design, she researches into the ways that humans express and respond to emotions, as well as the psychological healing effects of the language of light on people. Her current research focuses on light and its effect on the psychic level of people; in other words, how light interacts with people and the resulting expressions by the light, tentatively defined as the ‘language of light’. In her master’s programme, she continues to explore the possibilities of the language of light and how it functions, how it can help people living alone in particular to express and release their emotions and the role changes of light can play in the narrative process in forms of experimental film.

Zijing Zhong currently is an artist and designer. Born and raised in China, Zijing discovered a passion for art and design while living in Hangzhou, a city which is considered to be an art paradise in China. Here he appreciates the stunning views of West Lake, studied art at the China Academy of Art (CAA), and gained unlimited power of creating things. He used to explore industrial design, then took himself on a long journey from graphic design to narrative research. He believes in the significance of the stories behind all kinds of works, such as the Tetrad in 2022, and in the works designed for the World Earth Day every year since 2016. Prior to those works, he was welcomed in designing University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC)’s products for new students in 2019 and updated his designs in 2020. He also worked as a collaborative artist at Bilibili and was invited to create Bilibili’s visual art works and daily updates. Zijing has also held other roles including lyricist, composer, arranger, electronic music artist, studio founder, photographer, and Apple developer.