ToolsIllustrator
Photoshop
Indesign
DeliveriesBrand Identity
Delivery System
Critical Design
Typography
World Building
Campaign
OVERVIEWDesigning a nation brand to visualize the cost of endless competition. In a society driven by productity and comparison, people are pushed into a constant rat race–working harder for marginal gains, while only a small fraction benefits. The pressure is not only economic; it becomes cultural, emotional, and even parental.
PRI OLYMPICS
After observing involution in Chinese cities—housing pressure, the education arms race, “996” work culture, and status-driven consumption—I reframed these forces as a system rather than individual failure. I chose the Olympics as the core theme for PRI because it turns everyday pressure into a public spectacle: rules, rankings, and “winning” become the language of survival. In the PRI Olympics poster series, each discipline satirizes a different form of endless competition.
The posters of the PRI illustrate the never-ending competition toward achieving success. Mothers push their children to excel, believing that by scheduling every moment of their child’s day and ensuring they perform at their best, they are proving their care and love. Mothers of the PRI engage in cycling, aiming to meet or surpass the expected standards of parental care. Their sense of achievement comes from having “parental care” statistics that are above average, as if parenting were a competition.
RAT RACE
I designed a brand mark for my fictional nation, the People’s Republic of Involution (PRI)—a speculative identity system where endless competition becomes official policy. The symbol merges a double-headed hammer into an infinity-like loop, with both ends straining toward a single nail at the center. It visualizes involution as a self-reinforcing cycle: constant pressure, ranking anxiety, and optimization efforts that feel intense yet produce minimal progress. By placing the nail inside the loop, the mark suggests a system that keeps striking without truly moving forward—inviting audiences to see this “rat race” as a designed structure we can recognize, question, and ultimately break.
MAKE THE INVISIBLE SYSTEM VISIBLE
I developed a custom typeface to anchor PRI’s identity in the same logic as its national mark—hammer, nail, and the loop of endless optimization. The letterforms are built from rigid, tool-like strokes that feel engineered rather than expressive: straight verticals read like nails (the status quo), while clipped terminals and angled cuts echo the impact and resistance of a hammer strike. By embedding this construction into the alphabet, the ideology becomes infrastructural—present in every label, form field, headline, and instruction, so the nation’s pressure to “improve, compare, repeat” is literally written into its communications.
VISUAL IDENTITY
To make PRI feel believable as an institutional system, I applied the typeface within an “official frame” of tight grids, forms, codes, and index panels, paired with propaganda-like clarity. Across documents, the layout is organized by two governing lines—a standardized typographic rule that acts like a bureaucratic baseline—while the hammer mark sits locked at the center, visually “stuck” in the system it enforces. I also introduced the infinite-loop as a fifth brand element. Together, the type system, central mark, and loop create a repeatable language that unifies PRI’s passport, dossier pages, and entry forms into one coherent nation-brand ecosystem.
From Object to
Identity Mark
Identity Mark
I began this project by building a double-headed hammer sculpture to embody involution—one side driving the nail in, the other pulling it out. That physical form became the reference for PRI’s brand mark. Through iteration, I preserved the core structure while refining it into a simpler, more scalable symbol—resulting in the final logo that better captures the loop and is optimized for institutional use.