Eleven students’ works from the Department of Visual Communication Design at Asia University (AU) were granted 2019 Red Dot Awards, in which ten won the Brands and Communication Design Award, and one won the Design Concept Award. Among the award-winning works, the special-collection work entitled “Track Back to” designed by Yi-Yun Shiu et al. and the poster work entitled “Empathy” designed by Bo-Ya You both won the Best of the Best Award.

“The Red Dot Award: Communication Design is now renamed to be the Red Dot Award: Brands & Communication Design which is granted to the best designs of brands and creative projects,” said Prof. Yuan-Rong Li, the dean of the College of Creative Design at AU. He also mentioned that there were 8697 design-concept works across 48 nations participating in this year’s competition, and ten of the design-concept works by AU students won the prizes. “As to the competition for the Design Concept Award with a total of 4218 participating works, one design work by a group of three AU students were awarded in this year,” said Prof. Li additionally.

The work “The Legend of a Boat,” which won the Design Concept Award, was designed by three students, Ruo-Xin Zhou, Rui-Shan Tu, and Ding-Jun Wang. It is a kind of food packaging of “twisted roll” (a kind of snack) taking inspiration from a longline fishing boat of the Xiaoliuqiu Island in Taiwan, and is also a symbol of economies, cultures, histories, and hardships of the fishermen’s daily activities in the Xiaoliuqiu Island. The work was created as a shape of a fishing boat. It can be imagined that a fishing boat was held in position by hanging from a rope or chain. Therefore, it is interesting that consumers must remove the rope to take out the twisted roll to eat. There are three product packaging designs for different flavors, and each packaging design has a different story.

The work “Track Back to,” which won the Best of the Best Award in this year, was created by Yi-Yun Shiu and four other students. The work includes three special-collections to memorize three “sunset” industries in Taiwan, respectively: blacksmithing, bespoke tailoring, and idol making. The series of sound recordings not only keeps the original sounds of three kinds of industrial works, but also corresponds to three musical melodies, namely, Punk, jazz and blues, and Nanguan musics, respectively.

The work “Empathy” designed by Bo-Ya You also won a Best of the Best Award. She said that the theme of the design is to reduce confrontations, hatreds and  discriminations by thinking, tolerating and accepting others. Therefore, she used orange to represent tolerance, and combined three Chinese characters: “Tolerance, Acceptance, Rapport” with images to show a feeling of tolerance. It may be thought as a symbol of the power of empathy with people.

Other AU students’ works in the list of this year’s awards include the “Taichung” by Jia-Jun Hou et al., “Kickit” by Ya-Chu Chen et al., “We Are Not Different” by Ting-Chun Wang, “Danger Is in a Place That Are Not Easy to Find” by Li-Ying Chen, “Culture as Food” by Yu-Tzu Yeh, “Three Men Working on Recording” by Yi-Cing Wang et al., “The Little Vampire Charger” by Si-Wei Fang and Bo-Yu Liao, and “Zhao's MUSIC” by Shih-Ting Huang et al.

“We are all happy with the good competition results of this year, because AU’s students receive a variety of prizes in the categories of packaging design, poster design, brand design, album design, etc.,” said Prof. Chien-Hua Cheng, the head of Department of Visual Communication Design at AU. In the past nine years, AU has achieved a lot of accomplishments. Specifically, a total of 85 works by AU students won various prizes in the Red Dot Award. Among them, 16 works won the Best of Best Award.