Interview with Jansword Zhu, Founder & Art Director of Jansword Design, CN

It is definitely a great honor for us as all 4 of our entries won the Muse Awards, including one Platinum award. Everyone in my team are so passionate about our job and have been working really hard.Winning the 2019 Muse Awards is a recognition of our style and hard work. It will also help our company to be well received in the industry. I think everything has formed a virtuous circle, from hard work to good design, to explosive market response, international exposure and other rewards.This allows me to invest more in our team and further improve our work. Eventually, it will help to attract more clients.

We have 4 winning entries this year. Kaishan provides evolutionary aesthetic possibility of Chinese Spirit; Ladypenguin P's wine package shows both visual and taste via fonts and illustration. Pavomea Crisp keeps balance between playfulness and gracefulness. For Musee, I thought It would be interesting if Musee won Muse award, and it did.

Active, variables, mass market and essential cultural resources make Chinese creative industry exciting and unpredictable. It is like a huge unfinished collaged painting with touches from 4000 years ago with a contemporary digital glitch. Creators, keep clear, keep your instincts.

1. Media industry and Social media will continue to evolve, with the B2C brand winning online winning it all, mostly.2. Design will become more about aesthetic and values, not separated elements. The internet spreading of the values of Anti-class and bravery will reflect in the design trend with super-flat, vivid and destructive design. The brand grasping the pulse of the Times wins.3. The boundaries are becoming vague: Art vs. design, online vs. offline, eating/ relaxing place vs. working place. More possibilities can happen and unpredictable opponents will appear.

Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist of the 20th century, has a great influence on me. I believe design is a process of transmitting energy via image. “Energy” is huge, more than only message, idea or emotion, but the spirit and soul of human being. Channeling the right part of energy of a designer and transform it into right forms makes what is the right design. It is a psychological and spiritual process indeed. Carl Jung’s opinion on image, which is “IMAGE is ENERGY” in my understanding, definitely changed my view of the world.My Japanese Mentor, Yoshihisa Shirai and Mishima Tento, also inspired me greatly when I was studying in Tokyo. Mr Shirai taught me “What are the rules” and “How to break rules”. Mr. Mishima enlightened me with “Draw the wind and catch your heart“. Unfortunately, Mr. Mishima passed away with unfinished lessons. However, his voice, encouragement and spirit will forever echo in my heart.

I believe that the three-key values to the Web 2.0+ Market are brand positioning, aesthetic power and self-diffusing(Social media communication) power. Every design is a communication process. Not only should a design be “beautiful”, it should also conquer the aesthetic highland, talk to the target audience and provoke them with the diffusing of social media. Good design is a reflection of Epoch. Socially active mass is vital nowadays due to the theory of “Spiral of Silence”As I have a trilingual background and upbringing, I preserved a sensible reading on Chinese online culture, Neo-Chinese aesthetic and different appreciated values in Japan, Europe and America, which allows me to shift among different thinking modes for different design processes.

My new book “INVISIBLE Z AXIS: Art History Through the Lens of Astrology Archetype” will be published in about 2 months.The book perceives art history with ten archetypes deprived from meaning of ten planets (both eastern & western astrology). The book reveals an invisible Z axis of archetypes , in additional to X axis(time) and Y axis(region) and has been endorsed by many great artists around the world. The first edition is in Chinese and hope it could be translated into English soon.