Designing Ming & Ping

Ming & Ping is an electro-pop musical group consisting of Hong Kong-born identical twins, Ming and Ping, and myself as producer. While I no longer produce the music, I remain the visual and organizational side of the group, helping them achieve international success with highly stylized artwork and memorabilia to match their electrifying music.

Producing the visual side of Ming & Ping has given me an opportunity to flex every creative muscle in my body as well as gain invaluable experience in directing creative teams, organizing time and budget, and simply letting talented people do what they are good at.

EXTERNAL LINKS:
MING & PING
Ming & Ping on Spotify
M&P on iTunes

Like most of my entertainment projects, this one starts with a key image to introduce the main concepts. Photo by Coy G. Koehler

In this case, Ming & Ping already had a strong identity within their music, in which they reference pop culture and 80’s kitsch, with a sleek metropolitan sensibility. We worked together to develop an equally sleek and monochromatic look, but adding the most basic color scheme to make things “pop.” This look came to be known as “CMYK Pop.”

The main goal was to present a super modern image using nearly sterile layouts, hairline accents and minimal typography. We then added a splash of the high-chroma CMYK color scheme to energize the whole image and make the 80’s reference.

Ideation

Tribute to Patrick Nagel.

I’ve designed, illustrated, and produced most of the memorabilia for Ming & Ping, keeping a strong focus on the CMYK Pop theme and a keen eye on budget.

Because Ming & Ping remains a self-released act, the main design challenge is to squeeze every last drop of creativity out of a very low budget. This has created a continuous search for new ways of using popular and affordable materials and manufacturing processes.

EXTERNAL LINKS:
More Products on the Ming & Ping Store

Album Artwork

: mingping.com 2004

: MP2 2005

: Causeway Army 2007

: The Light of Day / The Darkness of Night 2014

Posters

Memorabilia

: Stickers

: Pins

: Stuffed dolls

: Smartphone wallpaper

: Masks

: Hot Sauce

Apparel

Ming & Ping Pong iOS Game

: Ming & Ping Pong Splash Screen

: Settings Screen w/ link to buy music

: Game Screen

Photographs and videos are used purely for promotional purposes, so a lot of care is taken in watching over their production budgets. Working with my talented circle of collaborators, we have had lots of fun with the twins and have gotten very creative at making high-production images and videos using very “indie” budgets.

I also provided art direction and production design for these and other photos and videos. More are available on mingping.com.

EXTERNAL LINKS:
M&P Videos on Youtube