The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics have come to an end, but people's love for the ice piers of the winter Olympic mascot has not ended. You may not know that the ice pier has become the "top stream" of the Winter Olympics, which is inseparable from the efforts of Cao Xue and his team from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts for more than 10 months.
Whether it is the "stunning" shake at the opening ceremony, or the famous scene of the "pier" that turned over the whole network, the ice pier with its charm conquered everyone.
On the afternoon of February 27, Cao Xue, the designer of the "Ice Pier" and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, visited the Guangzhou Book Purchase Center to bring readers and friends thoughts on creativity and Chinese design.
The scene of the event
Cao Xue said that the design should be "high in vision and low in stature", and also have the spirit of "daring to be the first". For the popularity of the "ice pier", Cao Xue believes that the previous mascots or dolls were of a single material, but they let the "ice pier" have a unique ice shell, whether from the visual or tactile will give the audience a new experience.
What is Chinese Design? Does Chinese design have to have Chinese elements? Regarding "Chinese design", Cao Xue pointed out that it is necessary to think systematically, not to think elementally, "ice pier" has stimulated the strong creative desire of netizens, and "everything can be ice pier" makes Cao Xue feel very interesting.
"The traditional Chinese visual pattern, used in today's cultural and creative products, is called the national tide? No, Chinese designers want to dig into traditional Chinese culture, but traditional culture and the visual elements of traditional culture are two different concepts. Looking for a Chinese context is not simply to paste the visual elements of the ancestors on the product. For example, there is no so-called Chinese cultural visual pattern on the ice pier, and there is no paper-cutting and five-sheep sculpture. But it is a Chinese design, a design that was born in Guangzhou. Cao Xue said.
The birth of the "ice pier"
On October 10, 2018, when the publicity team of the Winter Olympic Organizing Committee came to the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts to publicize the mascot collection activity, the college immediately started the formation of the design team, with Cao Xue as the person in charge, and a total of 14 people devoted themselves to the design of the mascot of the Winter Olympic Games. The mascot collection lasted 84 days, and a total of 5816 design proposals were received, and 10 works were shortlisted, of which 3 were from the Guangmei team.
From the original idea of the sugar gourd, to the attempts of various animals, from the sugar coating to the transparent ice to the ice crystal shell, after more than 1,000 repeated modifications, it was finally presented as the "ice pier" we saw. After 10 months, tens of thousands of design sketches and more than 100G of documents were repeatedly polished and modified, and finally Cao Xue's design team "found" the unique mascot - "ice pier".
Talking about the "out of the circle" of the ice pier, Cao Xue left a golden sentence: "Design is always the future tense, there is no past tense." "Although the ice pier exploded, it was a new starting point for him and for the design team.
The online live broadcast of the event attracted about 100,000 viewers to watch online, and nearly 200 people participated in the offline sharing session. In order to let online and offline readers have a better sense of experience and participation, a wealth of interactive links were set up during the event. Cao Xue patiently answered and discussed in depth with the readers on the spot. In the early stage of the event, through the online launch of the topic activity of "I am in the same frame as the ice pier", nearly 100 readers participated online, and finally selected a lucky reader to come to the event site, and Cao Xue drew a stick figure drawing with the same frame as the ice pier on the spot, and the readers shouted "happy, excited and excited" on the spot.
In addition, an interactive lottery session was set up in the live broadcast room and the scene, and the readers were given away with ice pier keychains and theatrical tickets related to the theme of the Winter Olympics, and the atmosphere was very warm. Many fans said that the sharing meeting was full of dry goods and benefited a lot: "This is a good value for money art class. Cao Xue shared with the audience some tips for painting ice piers, which made people feel unfinished.
It is reported that from February 26 to March 18, "Wonderful is Around - Guangzhou Sports culture exhibition" was exhibited in the highland cultural space on the sixth floor of Guangzhou Book Purchase Center (Tianhe Store), the exhibition takes "Guangzhou Sports Culture" as the theme, from the two aspects of competitive sports and mass sports, through precious physical collections such as graphic materials, documentary photography, Guangzhou Asian Games and Guangzhou International Marathon, taking readers to review the achievements made by Guangzhou city in recent years in inheriting sports culture, telling sports stories, and promoting the development of sports.
Nandu reporter Zhu Rongting