Chineasy was created to help people learn Chinese quickly using image mnemonics. The program builds on simple characters, showing that the character for door in fact looks like a door and so on. Chineasy founder ShaoLan Hsueh contacted us to create illustrations that could easily show the ideograms without using much color, in a way that could appeal to all ages.
We developed a series of whimsical illustrations for the introductory program. The system was originally created using only black-and-white ink, in response to the entrepreneur’s idea of distributing the alphabets in print newspapers in Asia and Europe.
These first illustrations underpinned the further development of Shao Lan’s concept, which borrowed heavily from the aesthetic we presented and expanded the program for commercialization.
These illustrations helped shape the aesthetic of the Chineasy brand and program. Ms. ShaoLan presented Chineasy at TED Conference in 2013 and has been watched over 2.5M times as of January 2016.
The company launched a Kickstarter campaign in the fall of 2013 that raised over $310,000 to get the company off the ground. Thousands of people are now learning Chinese through ShaoLan’s pictogram method.
