Last bit of inspiration
It’s about seeing a brand in a different context wether it be through an artistic portrayal or through different languages, like what I’ve focused on for the past few weeks.
The help I’ve received with translations and explanations about their native tongues has been absolutely wonderful. In addition to many conversations regarding Thai, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, among others, and many exchanged emails about Arabic, I have a few diagram markups from some people that helped me. I thought they were interesting and are an essential part of the process. Here’s a few.
Korean help
Thai help
Mandarin help
upclose Thai help
The transliterations
A sneak peek to my passport book about the process of designing in other languages using Coca-Cola as an example. I’m thinking an accordion style so it can be spread fully out and seen in its entirety. Or maybe I could just put the whole thing on my blog?
Examples of what I’m studying (some very unfinished obviously):
McD
Updating my blog here and there with work. Here is the McDonald’s mess I made overlapping the web pages of regional sites. I wanted to see if there were any common themes… and there wasn’t anything too obvious besides the repetition of the golden arches. Identity is key after all.
Update
Multilingual Coca Cola. Currently working on a visualization for this in the dimensions of a passport.
English– Coca-Cola
Arabic– كوكاكول
Korean–코카콜라
Marathi–कोका-कोला
Japanese–コカ・コーラ
Chinese–可口可樂
Russian–Кока-Кола
Greek–Κόκα κόλα
Project Shift
My project has now switched to producing a guide or “atlas” on international branding by using Coca-Cola as a case study. Focus is primarily on multilingual design. Interesting stuff! Now to see it to the end!
Massive sites
If you go to the McDonalds Japan site, your computer may crash. In fact, their site is so jam packed with flash animations and music and just intense stimuli that my quite quick internet connection couldn’t handle it. There has to be a correlation between the tons of data the McDonalds Japan website and the internet users of Japan. I did some research and found a list of the top 10 countries with the highest internet download speed. Here it is:
1. South Korea 16,765 kb/s
2. Japan 16,465 kb/s
3. Lithuania 11,240 kb/s
4. Sweden 11,081 kb/s
5. Romania 9,875 kb/s
6. Latvian 9,591 kb/s
7. Bulgaria 8,885 kb/s
8. Netherlands 8,586 kb/s
9. Germany 7,346 kb/s
10. Russian Federation 7,138 kb/s
Most westernized countries aren’t featured prominantly.
In addition, try to open McDonalds South Korea link and your computer will most likely lag. Web designers design their websites with connections speed in mind as well, and need to understand what speed is available in their respective countries. Globalized web design does not work. But now… how do I SHOW this correlation? Massive site = Less of Swiss style influence.
Hindi characters intermixed with Roman/Latin characters
Here is a great example of Roman characters (and Western influence) mirroring a culture’s typographical style for an altogether different language and set of characters.
Hindi Characters
When considering international design…
“The language barrier is the first obstacle to overcome. Western languages codify words in written script whereas each Chinese character represents a word. So any brand moving into China has to decide how it will be rendered in Chinese–both phonetically and visually.”
Coke China
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