Visual Expression Of Urban Culture

The research of urban culture’s visual expression is a multidimensional design and analysis of a city’s shape, structure and spirit. It takes a holistic view of a city’s environmental atmosphere, style and combine them with its regional culture, historical culture, cuisine culture, and ecological culture. The primary purpose of urban culture’s visual expression design is to summarise the core of a city’s spirit and enable people to understand its characteristics and cultural value better and faster. This leads to better promotion of a city and significantly improve its competitive strength and value. Urban culture’s visual expression design is an modern approach to dig, refine, and combine a city’s various resources which improve our understanding of a city’s meaning, it is lack of an integrative method. Meanwhile, both the content of visual expression and successful cases are scarce. As one of the four ancient civilisations, China possesses many distinguishing and unique cultural characteristics. Their popularity needs to be promoted. The author strives to discover and attempt to demonstrate a city’s culture with a systematic method. Tremendous amount of market survey has been conducted prior to design and production. After a comprehensive study of contemporary city’s culture design cases, the author has summarised pros and cons to design a series of approaches.The core content of this thesis is to discuss and conclude research methods. It start with understand a city’s culture. This includes but not limited to visiting local museums, historical heritages, watching documentaries, taste iconic food and studying residents’lifestyles. Based on the results of the above activities, it defines a city’style and summarises its characteristics. Then it extracts signature symbol and visualise its culture by drawing pictures with various visual expression methods. This research utilises hand drawing technique to describe a city’s image, analyse its colour, and combine its personality with style demonstration and format design. In addition, it discovers patterns from existing cultural element and use creative method to show them to the public.The first chapter introduces research background, existing issues, purpose, and research methods. The second chapter describes the analysis of urban culture visual expression. It begins with fundamental concept, followed by clarification of the relationship between urban culture and visual expression, and ends with analysis of real cases. The third chapter explains three important design principles for urban culture visual expression. With these principles in mind, it is highly unlikely that the design could be off topic. The fourth chapter discusses research methods, it systematically discovers the workflow of urban culture visual expression design. The fifth chapter proves the design theory by applying the workflow to visually express Wuhan’s culture.