DIGITAL ART DESIGNER

Yawen Cong

Chinese designer Yawen Cong specializes in industrial design, digital art and contextual design. She graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven and is presently immersed in the dynamic realm of the metaverse, exploring facets such as NFTs, digital identity, AI programs, Mixed Reality and beyond. Yawen aspires to exemplify the boundless creative potential that technology affords through her role as a designer. Her vision extends to empowering individuals to harness these technologies, fostering the creation of novel digital civilizations and the realization of a digital existence for all.

Pictogram Program Introduction

Pictogram Program stands as a digital sartorial creation using the AI painting program, Disco Diffusion. Within this exquisite collection, Yawen artfully delves into the concept that errors and serendipitous occurrences possess the innate potential to metamorphose into captivating design elements.
The process involves inputting a text description for the program to create a picture using an existing database. She noticed an interesting quirk in the algorithm when using Chinese characters—it recognized only part of the text and preserved the glyph part, resembling ancient Chinese characters. Intrigued by this "accident," Yawen replicated the process by entering more Chinese characters, generating numerous pictures. To enhance control, she specified the use of the Chinese character "bamboo" to generate a Chinese Shanshui painting with a green and black color scheme.
To make the results more practical, she incorporated these unexpected elements into digital fashion design, extracting glyph elements from the pictures, recombined them, and produced new Chinese-style clothing. The goal was to turn the original glitch into an innovative clothing pattern, allowing AI-generated patterns to define their own forms. Throughout the collaboration with the algorithm, Yawen documented the entire process to serve as a guide for future translations.

Generation Process

Program output for "bamboo"

Program output for "竹", the hieroglyph version of bamboo

Design process

Design output

These unique designs from the Pictogram Program Collection are now available as limited edition NFTs for collectors.