Yale Collections: 18th Century Chinese Gaming Tokens

In the fall of my junior year of college, I took a course called Graphic Design Methodologies. One of the larger projects we were asked to produce was to produce a set of promotional materials for a hypothetical exhibition of something from the Yale Collections. After some digging, I came across a collection of Chinese mother-of-pearl gaming counters from the 18th and 19th centuries. If you’re interested in learning about the history of these pieces, I highly recommend reading more about it here.

At first, I was unsure how I would entice people to come view the exhibition. There were many potential angles of attack. I thought, for instance, that I might try to create materials that emphasized the multi-cultural history of these artifacts, which originated in China but mainly used in the West. But considering the wide array of materials I was to produce, and thinking about the hypothetical audience of these materials (busy college students barely glancing at bulletin boards), I decided on a more sensational approach. When I had initially visited the Beinecke Library to view the collection and take photos, I was interested in the unique shapes of many of the tokens, and in the iridescence of the mother-of-pearl surface. I decided to see what I could do to emphasize these qualities. Iridescence is a hard thing to capture in a static photo, since its effect is only noticed when a surface is viewed from a variety of angles.

We were asked to produce a series of flyers, postcards, promotional instagram posts, and finally a mockup of an installation to be shown along with the artifacts.

Postcards

Flyers

Installation Mockup

I created a video showing what it might look like to have a blown-up image of one of the tokens, with a lenticular effect, such that at certain angles, an image of the family who owned this token would appear.