Yi Music Sito web

Press Kit

Unique Properties

There are many different types of music websites. Most of them are focusing on commercial pop music and so on. But the Yi Music website is designed for the purpose to let people know there is a mystery Yi culture in Southwest China. Yi people use their songs and voices to tell their stories about love, sadness, home, and beliefs. Yi Music is promoting cultural diversity and cultural communication platform.

Dimensions & Packaging

Website interface design, designed by photoshop and illustrator.

Tags

Yi nationality, Yi music

Production Technology

I used Adobe Illustrator to create icons that inspired by Yi traditional patterns and architectures. And also use photoshop to design the whole website interface and framework.

Design Challenge

It is very difficult to find out what kinds of patterns or colors can represent Yi culture. And this music website is not a commercial website but a cultural promoting website. It needs to be funny and interesting, and also functional and have educational meaning.

Research

There are more than 7 million Yi people live in China. Many Yi people live in the deep mountains in some provinces such as Yunnan and Sichuan. The Yi people believe in nature, ancestors, heaven and earth, sun and moon, etc. They are good at singing and dancing. The grandest festival of Yi is the Torch Festival. They have many unique totem patterns, embroidery crafts and musical instruments such as Yueqin.

Inspiration

I'm a Yi people who are one of the minority nationalities in China. It is always my interest to promote my culture to the world. We have our own language and culture. However, due to urbanization and the poor economy in the Yi region, many young people move out of our own homeland and gradually forget our own unique culture and language as well. Our culture nowadays is gradually disappearing and our people spread in many different places and forget our cultural roots. For me, my great great grandfather had moved from Yi village to Guangxi Province a long time ago, so I am also no so familiar with Yi culture. But I want to search my roots and protect Yi culture. Yi people good at singing and dancing, we use songs to tell our traditional legends and stories. And music is a format without boundaries and limitations, it is also a great way for people to know Yi culture from our music.

Project Duration

Guangzhou, China

Operation Flow

This is a conceptional project. Yi people believe in homeland and ancestor, gods of fire and moon. People can see all those factors in the home page. The green circle represents both sun and moon, these are great gods of Yi people. You can listen to Yi music from Yi singers after you click the home page and you can also share the song with your friends by creating your own DIY music poster in DIY sharing page. Then when you click the history page buttom, you will see the traditional instruments of Yi and know their names and their sounds. After you learn Yi music history and their stories, you can enter the game page and play a music game that you need to listen a part of tone from a Yi song, then figure out what instrument and tone it has used in this song. What's more, if you like Yi songs, you can also buy a music album in the online shop to support Yi singers, let them to create more beautiful songs in the future and also encourage more Yi children to purchase their music dreams.

Patents

NONE

Image Credits

Image #1: Designer Xu Manye, Yi Music, 2020.
Image #2: Designer Xu Manye, Yi Music, 2020.
Image #3: Designer Xu Manye, Yi Music, 2020.
Image #4: Designer Xu Manye, Yi Music, 2020.
Image #5: Designer Xu Manye, Yi Music, 2020.