Award-winning graphic designer Jie Jian has long explored how language extends beyond meaning, shaping experience and memory. Her latest project, Touch, continues this investigation, using a simple yet deliberate design framework to confront the complexities of physical contact, consent, and the emotional weight embedded in everyday language.
At its core, Touch is a study in contrast. The booklet documents a chat history between Jian and her friend Xinhe, but only the sentences containing the word “touch” remain. Within this constraint, an expansive narrative unfolds—one that oscillates between the casual and the deeply personal, from the lightness of petting a cat to the unsettling sexual harassment violations. These moments exist side by side without hierarchy, exposing how language fails to distinguish between tenderness and intrusion, comfort and harm.
Jian’s design choices heighten this tension. The embossed cover, a subtle yet intentional detail, invites the reader to experience touch before even opening the booklet. Running one’s fingers over the raised letters becomes a metaphor for the work itself—a reminder that language, much like physical touch, can be imprinted, internalized, and remembered long after the moment has passed.
Much of Jian’s work is defined by its ability to distill complex emotions into tangible forms. Touch is no exception. By isolating a single word across multiple contexts, she forces the viewer to reconsider the weight of language—how the same word can carry both warmth and violence, intimacy and discomfort. The result is a reading experience that is both deeply personal and universally resonant, reflecting on how we navigate language as much as we navigate our own bodies in the world.
For Jian, typography is more than just a visual system—it is a means of storytelling and giving form to unspoken experiences. In Touch, she reimagines a simple booklet as something far more powerful: an artifact of memory, a confrontation of language, and a space where the complexities of human interaction are laid bare.
