Danny Lau Chat

This is a project which consists solely of a namecard. (note: not a business card.)
At the beginning of 2009, Mr Lau came to us and asked if we could design a personal card for him and so we didn’t mind kicking off the new year with a small but nice assignment. The fact is that Mr Lau is a retired professional and he would still prefer to hand out a card which identify himself to a particular person whom he met. Due to a wide range of practices Mr Lau has  been involved in over the years, many younger practitioners from different fields seek him out for advice nowadays.

After understanding how Mr Lau would like to be represented by a printed material, we have based the concept around his multi-industries experience which most of the time lead people to consult with him.

Our first idea was to create a design that shows all the industries which Mr Lau has been through and gained great amount of experience. However, we soon realised that there are too many to be listed on a comparatively small printed surface which became too overwhelming. At this point, allow us to rewind back to a little while ago: before we took on this project, we were reading a book called ZERRO by Yukimasa Matsuda - a book that research into the field of symbols and signs containing the most common ones and those that are barely existing among today’s society.

After that, we have decided to only include his name (in both Chinese and English) and his contact numbers within the design. We were really inspired by the power of symbols and signs and hence we introduced the punctuation symbol - ellipsis (…) to replace what have been taken out. In order to achieve a more personalised visual representation of Mr Lau, we have extended the ellipsis into a set of seven dots. This extension is to create a underlying relation with the Chinese character ‘七’ which means seven in English. (Note: Mr Lau is the seventh child in his family.) We believe that by incorporating the chosen punctuation symbol, it symbolized Mr Lau himself taking on different roles within different contexts; while there are just too many to be mentioned.

A challenging aspect of this project was to deliver a design with bilingual components; in which Chinese and English. In order to execute this appropriately, we have researched into roman typefaces that would best harmonise with the comparatively narrow range of Chinese typefaces. A ’sans serif’ Chinese font and the Rotis Sans Serif designed by Otl Aicher were selected. We admire the idealism behind Aicher’s Rotis typeface design; the approach towards creating a family where serif and sans serif coexist. The idea of harmonious coexistence remains a critical element in this project.

Lastly, you might have noticed that the paper stock that we have used for this project featured a gloss reflective white on one side and an uncoated finishing on the other side. To us, this particular stock can further enhance our conceptual approach towards the design.

Card dimension: 85 x 55mm
Laser printed on Shimmer cote, 300 gsm.