In recent years, more and more Chinese designers have returned from their overseas studies and brought fresh blood from overseas. Gao Han is one of them. Born in 1995, Gao Han has a master's degree in graphic design from Yale University and is the founder of Workbyworks Graphic Design Studio. His works have won such famous awards as New York TDC Award, Tokyo TDC Award, Pentawards Platinum Award, HiiiBrand Gold Award, GDC Silver Award, DIELINE Awards Best Food Packaging Design Award, 360 Annual Packaging Award and other well-known domestic and international awards.

Unlike other designers who studied art since childhood, Gao Han was a "school bully" in school as a child, winning many prizes in mathematics, science and chemistry competitions. However, when it came to the college entrance exam, Gao Han enrolled in a polytechnic school in China because he could study industrial design without taking art subjects. Gao Han said that at a very young age, he knew he was born to be a designer. One scene he can think of from his childhood was when he suddenly became interested in the appearance of a television. "I would start thinking about why this logo was placed in this place, why it was this size, and what was the relationship between this logo and the rest of the TV's corners?" The seeds planted when I was young began to gradually take root in Gao Han's heart. After graduating from college, Gao Han didn't work in industrial design, but applied for an internship at designer Guang Yu's studio. The internship process was very hard, "Because I had almost zero knowledge of graphic design at that time, the initial stage of the internship was the hardest time I had so far. Every day, I took the subway from the west to the east of the city before the morning rush, and then took the last subway to go home after work, with a 4-hour round trip and 6 hours of sleep every day. What this work experience brought me was not only graphic design skills, a rigorous attitude, and a space for open and free dialogue, but also the idea that 'any idea can be presented, just need the ability at hand to be good enough to support your idea'."

After the internship, Gao Han's next step is to go to a better school to study graphic design more systematically. Gao Han's goal is Yale University. "Because Yale's graphic design is the best in the world." The biggest takeaway from entering Yale for Gao Han is the emphasis on individuality. "The school places a lot of emphasis on each person's deep understanding of themselves and on each person really doing what they want to do. This allows each person to develop his or her own body of work and his or her own methodology of work. That's why students who graduate from Yale make different designs, it's because they were different before they came in. While they are in school, Yale values finding these things that are different in each person, and it also helps them to develop only those things that are different. Yale doesn't teach you the skills of design, it teaches you things beyond the skills, and then those things feed back into your design work."

Gao Han says of the assignments he did at Yale, "He would do a lot of things that were completely different from graphic design, and he would even put his own experiences into his work." He cited an example. One of Gao Han's works at Yale was to record two cell phones on two sides of the same piece of glass, with the two sides of the glass being outdoor and indoor sound structures respectively. While the two phones were recording simultaneously, Gao Han also took images of the environment on both sides of the glass. While the audience listens to the different sounds of this work in the left and right ears at the same time, it is also combined with different visuals. "At this time you get a strong sense of contradiction, because the two recording devices are obviously very close to each other, but they sound very different. This kind of experimentation, in the Yale context, is all about design."

Also because of these attempts at Yale, Gao Han understood where the boundary between art and design was, and made it clearer that he wanted to walk down the road of design. As a leader among the new generation of post-95 designers, when talking about which award Gao Han was most excited to win, Gao Han said, "Probably the continued recognition from Tokyo TDC Awards." In this extremely important award for graphic design in Asia and the world, Gao Han has received the Tokyo TDC Award of Excellence and Nomination for three consecutive years from 2020 to 2022. Gao Han says he is satisfied with each completed work. Because each time is the result of deep consideration. Gao Han believes that the most essential element of a designer is "you must know in your heart who your audience is." Gao Han said, "Design is a kind of communication, you need to know who this message is communicated to."

Gao Han cited the example of the packaging design of "Naixin Ice Cream", which won the HiiiBrand Gold Award. "This product focuses on low-calorie. If I am such a consumer, what I really care about is how many calories this ice cream has. In fact, it is to flatten all the information layers, and then highlight the most important information. And doing so in the matter of low-calorie food is valid, eliminating the need for consumers to go to the back to read the nutrition facts. The whole design is the most straightforward way to do a most straightforward thing."

Gao Han's works are often known for their very text-based visuals, where large and small words or letters seem to have a soul in Gao Han's hands, with each stroke and even punctuation having its own expression and language. Gao Han's use of text mostly stems from his "non-visual" way of thinking, where he does not think about whether it looks good or not, but more about whether it makes sense. Gao Han believes that the act of "reading" is more complicated than looking, and the process involves viewing, transmission, thinking, understanding and feedback.

Gao Han cited another example of an assignment he did at Yale. In that experiment, Gao Han photographed a Korean man writing on a wall, and then printed out the image and hung it on the wall. "The words in the photo are simple tone words. But in that atmosphere in Europe and the United States, it is something that few people can read." While the audience was watching, Gao Han kept asking different people how they felt about the words on this picture, "Even though none of them knew the words, they all had an answer for me within five seconds and were very sure of it."

This experiment allowed Gao Han to discover that everyone has a graphic sense of reading words, and that people from different countries will have a different graphic sense of reading. This discovery gave Gao Han a better idea of what experience different layouts in design would bring to the audience. For example, Gao Han did the packaging design for HALOLAB. This product is made to be a solution for male hair as well as skin, which actually leans towards a medical solution. Therefore, Gao Han used the medical paper about this product as the background design to present in the package.

Gao Han also cited the recent example of "Binary Species" pet food. The packaging design of this brand also used Gao Han's best text visuals. Before Gao Han did the design, he first determined with the client that two levels of text were needed so that the information level would be rich enough. Then, he used the rules of grid design in it so that the audience could feel the visual characteristics and recognition of this brand packaging at the first glance. "When the message is graphic design with pure text as the main or only element, you need to take into account the graphic interest of the message and the text itself." Gao Han said.

In 2019, Gao Han founded the workbyworks design studio. This became the name of Gao Han's studio naturally because his Ins name is works, and after designing a poster for a friend that was accidentally signed with the name work by works in the signature. This is also in line with his expectation of his work: to speak with his work and to be down-to-earth. Gao Han is not interested in designing a fancy appearance or even winning any awards. "I am interested in this thing made to sell to consumers, whether consumers will choose this in a pile of shelves, whether the experience of using it after going back will be good, and whether they will continue to buy it afterwards, this whole set down is what I am interested in."

In this way of thinking, Gao Han's latest work is the packaging project of Liangpinpuzi. Gao Han designed a packaging system for Liangpinpuzi. Inside this system, Gao Han set a full set of color scheme. The biggest advantage of this system is that all these packaging designs themselves were actually done by Liangpinpuzi's own designers using Gao Han's packaging system. "That means that in many details, the design of this system itself needs to consider whether it is simple when it is used, whether it is something that everyone will use as soon as they get started." According to Gao Han, taking the design of an individual package to 100 points is what he did before. And designing a system that allows everyone to do 100 packages and all achieve 80 points is his recent research.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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