Research On The Calendar Series Design Based On Gan Zhi Calendar

Gan Zhi(Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches) calendar is one of the traditional Chinese dating system, including numbering the years, months, days and time of even smaller scale. Especially, the day recording system of Gan Zhi is continuous without any mistakes from 2700 years ago, which is the known longest day record around the world. However, Gan Zhi calendar is no more familiar to the young generations who turn to the internationally-used Gregorian calendar more often in daily life. For the pu rpose to popularize this Chinese traditional calendar among the contemporary generation, Gan Zhi calendar is interpreted and visualized based on modern visual communication design in this study.Attention needs to be paid on people’s daily habits of dating time, including desk calendar, wall calendar, and calendar software in PC and APPs in smart phones, for the popularization of Gan Zhi calendar. The basic principles of Gan Zhi calendar are applied in the design of plane paper calendar comfortable for the aesthetic and use for young people.Gan Zhi calendar contains a series of time concepts: 60 years is one Hua Jia; 12 years is a cycle of Chinese zodiac; one year has 4 seasons, 12 months, 24 solar terms and 72 Hou; one day has 12 Chinese hours. The 10 Earthly Branches(Zi, Chou, Yin, Mao, Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Xu, Hai) and 12 Heavenly Stems(Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin, Ren, Gui) compose the 60 Gan Zhi pairs, which are the base units for all the time concepts mentioned above. To exhibit the extensive and profound Chinese culture inside Gan Zhi calendar, Gan Zhi calendar is expressed as a set of calendars on different time concepts and scales.The largest difficulty for this study is to find the method to translate the traditional culture with modern visual language, leading to the acceptance of the young generation. A set of calendars exhibiting Gan Zhi concepts visually are designed as cultural derivatives in this study to solve the problem above, considering the practicability, dayto-day use, time-effectiveness and interestingness of calendar design. In calendar design, the following two parts are deeply explored in the study: font design to create basic elements; editorial design to generate organization model. Including font design of 22 Chinese characters(10 Earthly Branches and 12 Heavenly Stems) and editorial design of calendars with different time scales( years, months, days, hours). Besides, the aesthetic tastes and usage habits are carefully taken into account in the design to make the set of Gan Zhi calendar beautiful, useful and interesting in practice, bring the traditional Gan Zhi culture back to life.