Two teams of students team up to create a series of sound-based stamps, and one of the world’s biggest furniture fairs gets some retro-contemporary branding in this week’s new entries.
Creative collaborations can make amazing things. “Sounds of Seoul & Hong Kong — A Stamp Collection” (above) was designed by a group of students from the School of Design at PolyU in Hong Kong and Hongik University in South Korea, who worked together to research Hong Kong and Seoul and design a series of postage stamps. It was important that each team not only discover and determine one example of visual uniqueness that can be found in both cities, but they also had to graphically connect Hong Kong and Seoul by finding a coherent visual style that respects the uniqueness of each place. Thankfully, the student had a wide array of things to choose from, like a natural or geographical element, a fashion style or item, a music-related impression, and more.
The teams didn’t want the final product to be a cliche and predictable, so they passed up topics like traditional food and pop culture and instead focused on visualizing sounds to represent the hustle and bustle of the two cities. For example, the Hong Kong crosswalk signal is a very special feature to foreigners because it is so loud and quick. Another example is the South Korean subway melody, a distinctive soothing sound that all residents of Seoul can recognize. The choice of subject gave them room to explore abstract graphic representations, and the students settled on using simple shapes, gradient shading, black backgrounds, and an offsetting warmer and cooler color scheme. As a final touch, the set of stamps was printed together on a stamp card with an online website that showcases the graphics in motion with sound.
