Macao Design Week 2019

The Macao Design Week is a yearly event held in Macao, China. It is organized by the Macau Designers Association (MDA) which was founded in 1986, while the city was still under Portuguese rule and spelled according to Portuguese orthography. Sparked by the felt need to propagate design as a discipline, to further its public awareness and to improve on the local designer’s education, MDA, over a period of more than 30 years, unfolded an incredible range of activities.

What started as the Macau Design Biennial in 1994 meanwhile turned into the Macau Design Award, and other, theme-based competitions and exhibitions were initiated starting in 2004. In 2015 MDA even managed to open the Macau Design Centre. That same year the Macao Design Week was organized for the first time.

In sum, the association worked hard to turn Macao into a regional hub for interchange and networking in the field of design, reaching out today to the wider Asian area and an international public.

The 2019 edition of the Design Week invited Portuguese designers to exhibit their work alongside that of participants from Macao. The visuals promoting the event were designed by Untitled Macao, a local design agency founded in 2017. Their concept is based on four 3D-generated shapes and radiant colors, orange and green, exactly those that can give headaches in print. But they excelled at it!

The impact of the posters is further boosted by the typeface used: it is Minotaur Beef, designed by Jean-Baptiste Levée and available from Production Type. It is characterized by straight lines in places where you wait for curves, expressive ink traps and unexpected, bold solutions. The graphic designers at Untitled Macao took special care and developed a custom lettering style for the Chinese text that picks up on these devilish features in order to bring heavenly harmony to the typography.

Design: Untitled Macao
Video production: Mirage Visuals 蜃海視覺
Director: Puzzle Lai 賴明德
3D animation: Pancy Ng 吳穎儀