Shih, Jia-Wun 2010-2014 Portfolio
Almost real 2011
In 2011, while 3D was already quite fashionable in the film industry, I used red and blue to produce this series of works, which need to be watched with Anaglyph Simple style 3D Glasses. I wanted to emphasize that, with preconceptions, the pursuit of truth often overlooks important details.
Fat Food 2011
As I was studying fine arts in college, I was trained to work with different sorts of materials. Fat Food is a full-sheet size watercolor work using drybrush technique. It simply mocks the consumption of junk food.
The Gift from the Ex thesis + video 2012
During my last year of college, I joined an image workshop, expecting to improve my ability in planning, image editing and storytelling. For this work, I interviewed friends who wanted to sell or discard gifts from past lovers, in order to understand the stories between people, investigate people’s feelings towards objects and, finally, use video to create marketing techniques for objects wrapped in feelings. When I look back at this work, which includes my thesis, I am not yet satisfied with the result. I hope to get the chance to further develop the above-mentioned concept during my master studies.
Perfume The bottle of perfume in this short film is both the spectator and the timeline of two past lovers’ relationship. When I interviewed him, its owner would indicate past heights of remaining perfume while telling his story. That is what inspired me the concept of the film.
Arm-shaped pollow
“After parting with the other's arm”
The interviewee receives a handmade gift.
The interviewee introduces the meaning of every doodle on the armshaped pillow.
I interviewed lots of friends during this project and dug out their stories little by little. I discovered quite surprising facts, for instance, the only thing that came up three times among what people would want to discard is a ring! I also discovered the various reasons for which people would want to get rid of their gifts. Those whose purpose was to forget about their past relationship actually didn’t need concrete objects to recall it.
Identities 2012-2014
This identity was made for an indie band consisting of a Belgian composer and a Taiwanese singer. I made a hand-carved stamp for the logo part and drew the main image using a charcoal effect. In response to the band name, I combined gray background and cyan logo, like the clear moon light in the bright daybreak.
This was made for a compound shop located in Nantou. It serves fresh food, and sells plants and liquor. I suggested to name it Care Rooms because, more than just a health shop, it’s also a backpacker guesthouse. This logo was inspired to me by the vision tests that we took at our school health center. The fonts are ready-made ones that I modified according to my personal taste.
This title font was designed for an event promoting India tourism. I combined Chinese characters with Hindi's soft font style, strokes converted into dots, so that people would think about India at first glance!
This design was commissioned to a company I worked for last year by a waffle shop in Macau. I used the waffle shape to represent the W of Waffleland , and I chose a font whose shape reminded me of sweet sauce. Below are two other proposals, based on the same concept but using different methods.
This design uses simpler lines, both for the drawing and the Chinese characters.
The most figurative version, with handwritten characters, targeting young female customers.
SHS advocates that interdisciplinary study is practical and in movement. I designed the logo for their short talk workshop based on that concept. I chose the image of water waves, because water plays an important role in both the literary and the scientific worlds, and the wave symbolizes the influence of the lectures.
In this design, the use of handcrafted Chinese characters and that of the handwritten French name with a smiling face made of its last three letters and a dot, focuses on the simpleness of handmade bakery and on a feeling of liveliness and proximity. The icon is the combination of a piece of bread and a birdhouse, which stands for the bakery store and symbolizes gluttony (the french word goulu means greed ).
Packaging of Beans 2013
This commissioned work consists of two packagings for broad beans, one with Indian curry and one with Chinese Mala flavor. Each one is made of different elements representing the culture to which it belongs. Because they were to be sold on the Internet mainly, I made them with strong contrasts so they would be easily noticeable by the consumers.
This is a second proposal, which emphasizes the use of carefully selected, natural and simple ingredients. The radial arrangement of the design came to my mind as I successively thought about fireworks and a gathering of friends.
Blind Mood Shao Nu performing + concept 2013
In 2013, I started collaborating with Taiwanese photographer Chen-Long Ho on these series of photographies Blind Mood Shao Nu . The pronunciation of Blind Mood is similar to that of baimu , which, in Mandarin, relates to the action of rolling one’s eyes, and in Taiwanese, its original language, is a slang meaning incognizant and blockhead. Unlike the average model/photographer relationship, where the first is usually passive, our relationship is based on team work: I came up with the concept of eye-rolling , which mocks the posturing of a certain kind of beautiful girls on the Internet ("Internet beauties").
For the first series of photographies, we focused on strange atmospheres and on producing a sense of conflict by integrating crowds. The location is one of Taipei’s hot spots for “Internet beauties” photography.
All for Winter 2010
I first went to Europe in 2010, where I spent three months of a frugal life. That's when I became fascinated by the Netherlands. Through traveling, I started to get interested in cultural shocks. In a place - Europe -, with blur borders (Taiwan is an island so wherever you want to go, you have to cross the sea), I still could feel great cultural differences.
In the winter of the same year, as I was keep ing this cultura l s hock in mind (especially about the food), I sent a package containing Taiwanese food and a small user guide with illustrations, in order to share my culture with my Dutch friends. I added the romanization under the Chinese name of each item.
Traveling benefited to my design abilities by raising my sensitivity to cultural differences. It also taught me how to look at my own culture from a different standpoint, and how to improve it and make more people appreciate it through design.
Postcards of Cities 2013
In 2013 I visited Europe for the third time, with an even tighter budget, to the point that I had to cut on postcards costs and so began to draw scenes inspired to me by each city and then sent them to my friends back in Taiwan. From Paris, what I wanted to share with my friends wasn't the Eiffel Tower but roofs, chimneys and windows.
In my eyes, Paris is made of such daily life details as the red metro signs, the white baguettes, the blue Seine river, not of romanticism.
In this map, I enlarged my favorite places and drew Paris' concentrated arts and culture districts as well as its special block structures.
In Brussels, the orderliness of the waffles, of the chocolate and the Art Nouveau buildings was enchanting, I felt like savoring the entire city piece by piece.
The buildings in Amsterdam, thin, tall and tight, with their large windows and the huge variety in their architecture, are very different from the typical residential style of Taiwanese cities. And as for the tulip stereotype, I simply drew the outline of the flower as an echo of the buildings shape.
Hotel de Trianon branding + website 2013
This brand design was commissioned by Hotel de Trianon in Taitung to the company I used to work for. From their CIS, their signboard, the promotion material for their events to the visuals of their website, I was in charge with every aspect of the design, a rare opportunity to get when working for a company, which helped me improve my communication skills.
original font
Trianon font
I made the corners of the words smoother so they look friendly. Also, in the first character, the strokes were shortened to make the two persons* look closer to each other. *
stands for the word person in Mandarin
As the hotel's owner graduated from Cordon Bleu culinary school, he wished to use the same blue as Cordon Bleu's logo for their corporate color. Cool grey seemed like a great match to me. In order to avoid a sense of distance, I added illustrations on the hotel supplies, which convey their function at the first glance.
The single-page website design provides user-friendly browsing to the travelers. I added elements of Taitung among the French streets sceneries, like the hot air balloons from the Taitung Hot Air Balloon Festival.
During the proposal period, I tried different styles and color combinations for the website visual.
The information on the website is displayed through narrative illustrations.
Because a single-page website could have been monotonous, we animated a few elements, like the flickering lights of the loft windows and the moving sign at the entrance of the website.
The traffic info map also includes icons for hotspots and recommended restaurants. Mousing over them makes their information appear.
Blind Mood Shao Nu performing + concept 2014
This series of black and white photographies is my second collaboration with Chen-Long Ho. As we'd noticed that our 2013 series was sometimes referred to as horror, we got inspired by Japanese horror comic book artist Junji Ito and imagined this special style of make-up. Not only did we shoot in grayscale mode, all the styling and scenes composition only used black and white.
While most of people pursue the trend of fashion, we're looking to create non-mainstream beauty. Since we're not good at imitating the pretty styles which get public attention, we decided to express what we're good at unreservedly. Thus the rolling eyes in the pictures are real, we don't resort to post-production effects!
As a graphic designer, after discussing the tone of the works with the photographer and seeing how the make-up artist would achieve the comic book effects, I understood I had the ability to know how to render visual effects and produce dramatic tension. The results obtained through our team work were beyond my imagination.
Our usual combination of exaggerated expressions and body postures increases the surreal aspect of our manga-like images. We used ribbons and projection to strengthen the sense of space.