The Study On Henry Steiner’s Cross-cultural Design

Henry Steiner, Austrian, which was born in Vienna and grew up in New York, is a graphic designer. He came to Hong Kong in 1961, engaged in design work and settle in Hong Kong. During the time in Hong Kong, Henry Steiner started to build up his distinctive and unique design style with cross-cultural elements. His presence on one hand to a certain extent, promoted the propagation of western modern graphic design in early stage of Hong Kong; on the other hand, the characteristics of which he uses cross-cultural elements in design has also built up an enlightenment for local graphic designer for using local traditional elements.This dissertation is a case study of Henry Steiner, the main purpose of this research is to reveal the significance of Henry Steiner’s design towards Chinese graphic design development, and it plays an important role in helping the development of graphic design by its own reference and learning.The first chapter from which Henry Steiner descripted about his life experiences, it is not difficult to discover that life in New York and Paris has already built up Henry Steiner’s cross-cultural sense, which was way back before he arrived in Hong Kong. In Henry Steiner’s professional study, Paul Rand had a very significance influence on his learning during the time at Yale, which built up the solid foundation on the connotation and technique on the usage of cross-cultural elements. Base on the analysis made in the first chapter, which Henry Steiner was deeply affected by two of the important mottos of Paul Rand, the second chapter goes into more deeply the philosophy of balance aesthetics on the design work of Henry Steiner, which at the same time shows thesimilarities between the design implication of Henry Steiner and the philosophy of the doctrine of the mean, all of the above concluded that Henry Steiner has also obtained the philosophical connotation of the doctrine of the mean in the way he design. By using the philosophical basis of the doctrine of the mean, the third chapter analyzed and generalized Henry Steiner ‘s design work by the different implementation on the philosophy of balance aesthetics.Finally, back to the discussion of the meaning and purpose of this study, things that worth us to study and learn from Henry Steiner are the attitude and different perspective towards the attention of the surroundings and the interest in local cultural elements as to their values in design. The way he able to take ordinary things or visual elements in everyday life and transformed them into something new and unusual with extra meaning endowed. This helps us to breakthrough the perspective blind spot when we try to be concerned about the traditional culture. From this point of view, cross-cultural study of Henry Steiner is also accompanied with the reflection on our own design with reference on traditional culture. To defined Henry Steiner as the role of enlightener of Chinese graphic design, in connection with the deepening of intercultural development in today’s society, research around Henry Steiner will also involve the issue of development in graphic design in the future. Moreover, it is also the mingling of traditional philosophy of the doctrine of the mean with cross-culture, which brings up novel enlightenment thinking.