Sound of Galaxy

The Campus Singer Contest is Tsinghua's annual student singing competition, run by the Student Union. Each season runs for months of rounds, from open qualifiers to a final in the campus gymnasium. As visual lead for two seasons, I gave each one a single story and carried it through every touchpoint: posters, social campaigns, stage screens and merchandise, and onto the stage itself on show nights.

My role

I set the concept and visual direction for each season, designed the key visuals and logos, and led the design team producing campaign graphics, stage screen content and merch for every round. On show days I also worked the production desk: running the main screen projection and supporting the lighting and sound teams through rehearsals and the live show.

The 32nd season was a search for sound. I designed visuals for four of its rounds. The qualifiers in April 2022 opened the story on a strange island where sea meets sky, with clouds underfoot and whales in the air. For the freshman round in October, the logo became a maze to find your way through. For the semifinal in November, I froze a harp inside an iceberg, a sound sealed away and waiting to be found. For the final, I thawed that world into a soft spring palette of water, flowers and a harp around a custom logo that folds a treble clef into the characters 寻声. The campaign closed with one line: wherever the sound leads, we follow it together.

Within a month of Seeking Sound ending, we set the next theme. We wanted to move from a dreamy story to an epic one. The name 音河系 plays on 银河系, the Milky Way: a galaxy where notes are gravity and melodies are orbits.

The story: an Interstellar Institute traces a signal from deep space to this galaxy, where certain sounds raise its residents' happiness. Singers became the source of sound samples, and the audience joined the research team as the public jury. Every round of the contest became one chapter of the investigation, with its own palette and its own version of the logo.

The first round set the tone for the whole year: sci-fi blue-violet and flat line illustration. Poster, social campaign, registration and public-jury banners, and PASS cards.

The freshman round was co-branded with the Cosmos Island music festival, so it borrowed the festival's black-and-orange palette and a mechanical, technical illustration style.

The original-songs track is the Institute's side quest: making a sound of its own. To show the joy of creating music, it switched to a playful orange-and-blue palette with soft, childlike illustration. Poster, stage backdrop, social post and illustrations.

The first answer to the mystery: happiness rises when people find themselves in music. The round turned dreamy purple, with butterflies as the motif of self-discovery. Poster, stage backdrop, social posts and two session programs.

The second answer: happiness is also meeting others on the same frequency. The campaign moved from cold to warm to tell that shift from the individual to the group. The stage key visual stayed cold purple-green, while the poster, program, passes and merch went warm yellow-purple.

The mystery's answer: happiness is living your life as a song. The final brought every color of the year together on a deep-blue galaxy, across the main LED wall, side projections, poster, social headers and a full audience kit.

A story is a design system.

Giving each round a narrative reason for its look gave the whole team a shared reason behind every look and kept it consistent across months of deliverables. Anyone could ask what this chapter is about and get the palette from the answer. It is the same move I make in spatial work: turn a narrative into scenes people can walk into.