DI: What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
MDC : The whole theme of the bar is telling the story of an ancient Chinese legend love story, LiangZhu. The design is intrigued by the dazzling iridescent wings of the Morph butterfly. Bringing together the unique features of the female and male counterparts on each side of the wings, the design yields a gynandromorphy. The kaleidoscope-like butterfly pattern is the main planar elements, showing the unpredictable and mysterious of the blue butterfly under the light and shadow.
DI: What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
MDC : The goal is to create a strong bar and restaurant branding through an extraordinary dining experience to customers. Not only on the food itself, but the interaction should also go through from the sensation of each customer, like sounds, smell, visuals, lightings and the touches. The design also considers holistically, like the wall art sculpture, digital motion board, the special printing effects menu and etc, will bring you a different feel while you are in Morph.
DI: What are your future plans for this award winning design?
MDC : We are planning to expand Morph into our studio artwork collection theme. We found there are a lot of other forms we could turn into it.
DI: How long did it take you to design this particular concept?
MDC : Initial, we spent a month time for preparing the concepts, logo and application designs. And we continued work on this in this year.
DI: Why did you design this particular concept? Was this design commissioned or did you decide to pursuit an inspiration?
MDC : Morph is one of our design pitching projects for a top hotel brand, but we were not signed as the design consultant. As the design theme was created by Mars, we decide to explore the concept further in our upcoming artwork collection.
DI: Is your design being produced or used by another company, or do you plan to sell or lease the production rights or do you intent to produce your work yourself?
MDC : We will consider producing a series of artwork for our Mars Artwork Collection or selling it to an appropriate client.
DI: What sets this design apart from other similar or resembling concepts?
MDC : Liangzhu is a well-known legend story to Chinese, and as well as the butterfly symbols. But what makes it unique is the design and how we transform a traditional theme to edgy and modern elements.
DI: How did you come up with the name for this design? What does it mean?
MDC : The name Morph was given by the hotel operator side. It represents a particular kind of morpho butterflies. If you look at Wikipedia, you will find the name morpho, meaning “changed” or “modified”.
DI: What is the role of technology in this particular design?
MDC : The made a kaleidoscope liked animation, which you could find from our company website.
DI: Is your design influenced by data or analytical research in any way? What kind of research did you conduct for making this design?
MDC : A few visits to modern and traditional Chinese restaurants and bars in Asia, to get inspired by the different dining experience. Immersing the soul into the Chinese culture, cuisine and studied the dining habits. The research does not only stop capturing the way of how they layout the menu but to really understand the whole dining ritual and new generational dining style.
DI: How did you decide to submit your design to an international design competition?
MDC : Competition or awards could probably let more people know Mars Design from the crowds. It is important for the start-up and we should not give up anyway to show our works. But we will never make designs for awards.
