Our team is nominated for Best Wiki. See Awards.
Art Design
This year we have done a lot of designing work, both biological and artistic. Our goal is to convey abstract biological concepts in a fun and accessible way.
School identity
Our school, Wuhan University, is famous for its Chinese traditional architecture and cherry blossom, which are the inspirations of our main palette.
Cherry blossom and school's architecture are also the recurring elements in many illustrations.
Visual style
After studying Best Wikis and nominations of previous years, we find three wiki designs that are referentially valuable.
We can conclude that a flat, minimalist style is more apposite for an iGEM project. Meanwhile, our project utilizes CRISPR Cas9 system to edit gene, so we finally adapt a cartoonish paper-cut theme that both embodies the "cutting" function of our project and also keeps up with the modern UI design style.
Fonts
The year 2023 witnesses a trend of inktrap fonts. In correspondence with the inktrap font that iGEM official site is using, we also choose a cute heavy-weight inktrap font Butter Sans as title font.
A love letter to Bauhaus
I am Xiaoyi Wang, in charge of our team's graphic design this year. Bauhaus has been a pearl in graphic design history, and it also shapes my aesthetic tendency. So when I got the chance to design promotional materials for Plasmid Marathon, the first thing that came to my mind was to pay tribute to Bauhaus.
Keepsake of this year
After jamboree, we designed a metal bookmark in commemoration of this very extraordinary year. This bookmark will be put into production and given as a gift to team members, advisors and all others that gave us instructions along the way.
There are a few elements in this design that are worth explaining.
- The chart in the window represents qPCR, the signal output method of our project.
- Tag <svg> represents the svg animation in Description that has over 800 lines of code.
- There are two train tickets, one is from Wuhan to Shenzhen, the other is from Wuhan to Lanzhou, representing the trips we went on together.
- The matrix in the background represents the concentration matrix test we painstakingly carried out.
Tidbits
Morning, nothing on the dish.
A famous quote of our team member, summarizing his successive failures in a terse sentence.
Oops, there you are.
A flask of culture medium we forgot in the dusty corner of the lab. About a week later we discovered it as well as a tiny fungus forest.
He's in love!
The team leader that is busy spending time with his girlfriend, completely forgetting that his teammates are dying in the lab.
Question: What's for dinner?
The sign reads "Chef So-and-so's Northeastern Cuisine". This is our favorite restaurant around our school. We ate it almost everyday during summer vacation.
This is fine😆💩
Two of our favorite emojis. We loved sending them when the experiments were driving us insane.
Inclusivity
This year we also devoted ourselves to inclusivity, aiming to include more individuals in the iGEM community.
Our goal is to spread the beauty of synthetic biology to everyone on planet Earth.
Queer-friendly design concepts
We embody queer-friendly concepts throughout art design.
- Characters. All the characters drawn in our project are nonsexual, so that viewers of any gender identites can relate themselves to our project.
- We design a gender-inclusive outfit for our team in light of respecting queer members in our team. Horse-face skirt (马面裙) is a Chinese traditional genderless costume. However due to badget constraint, we settle for simpler but cheaper T-shirts. regrettably, this gender-inclusive skirt wasn't put into production.
- We respect queer team members and display their particular dressing styles in the illustrations on main page and team page.
Honoring women in STEM
The year 2023 is the 70th anniversary of the discovery of DNA structure. We wrote a popular science article and designed a metal badge in honor of Rosalind Elsie Franklin. She contributed to the discovery of DNA double helix, but her achievement was eclipsed by other male scientists. In this way, we spare no effort to declare that men and women can make the same achievement and should be equally honored.
