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From October 2025 to early 2026 I created a series of branding, product designs, packaging designs as well as various character designs for Deji Art Museum in my hometown of Nanjing, China.
The series of brick-built flowers. titled Pinban, spun out of Deji Art Museum's World of Flowers exhibition and its vast collection of Floral art pieces from the modern era ---- the largest exhibition of floral art in all of Asia. The brick flower models serve as ancillary products that accompany the exhibition, enhancing the experience by allowing audiences to bring home the bouquets seen in the masterpieces.
Also serving as the product line's visual advisor, I worked in close collaboration with the brick designers to art direct the look of the brick models -- the colors, the proportions, the overall look and feel all have to be meticulously finessed in order to meet the museum's standards.
The branding/visual design for Pinban had to be done in unison with the actual product design process, and this familiarity I established with the brick-building process gave me a much deeper look into the world of bricks, which really fed into the visual development process.
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The visual language of Pinban remains consistent across all the packaging materials, weaving together the mechanical precision of plastic bricks and the delicate and humanistic craftsmanship of the floral masterpieces they pay homage to.
The boxes for the 'Museum Collection' pays homage to the original masterpieces by placing the brick bouquets front and center onto the paintings. I also introduced a numbering system to enhance the collecting experience, which carried over to all the sublines.
On the background, one could see a subtle floral pattern, another design element that was carried to all packaging goods as well as all printed materials.
Pinban's product line was later expanded to introduce the 'Botanic Collection', a series of individual brick flowers sold in pairs of 2, that could both stand on their own and used as expansions for the bouquets.
The packaging for this series needs to speak the same visual language as the 'Museum Collection', while standing on itsown. It would have to be simplistic, organic, while feeling like a high-end product you would expect to find on the shelves of Deji Art Museum's gift shops. Thus the decision was made to introduce kraft paper as the material for the boxes ---- however, due to the nature of craft paper not being the easiest to print colors on, the boxes were designed to be double-layered, with full-colored inserts inside the kraft paper box and showing through the cut-out areas. (An alternative solution was also introduced where the full-color portions would be stickered on, but we ultimately moved away from).
The in-store packaging materials ---- the bouquet buckets, the blisters and more, all feature the design elements while each having a bit of a unique spin on it. The buckets were intended as a bit of a higher-end shopping experience so the floral patterns were fully colored completed with silver/golden trimming that matches the foiled lid.
The series of brick-built flowers. unofficially titled Pinmate, spun out of Deji Art Museum's World of Flowers exhibition and its vast collection of Floral art pieces from the modern era. The brick flower models serve as ancillary products that accompany the exhibition, enhancing the experience by allowing audiences to bring home the bouquets seen in the masterpieces.
Product tags used on merch featuring Yoshimoto Nara's Sculptural pieces, one (or a few) of these ended up being used.
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