Magic Electronics Projects

A 1993 electronics manual turned into a spot-green AR poster for Nibhond bookstore, scanned by 200+ visitors at the Wang Burapha design lab.

Problem

Wang Burapha used to be a busy cultural district and is now trying to bring people back. Working with Nibhond, a bookstore that has imported international books since WWII, the brief was to connect the shop's history with a contemporary design language.

Solution

An AR poster printed in spot color. I took a 1993 manual called Magic Electronic Projects and reworked its cover as an augmented reality piece. Electronics were the "magic" of 1993 and AR is the magic of today, so visitors get a playful way into the bookstore's history.

My involvement

I ran the project from archive research to final production. I designed the layout and type, managed the spot-color printing, modeled the 3D assets and built the WebAR layer in Artivive so visitors could scan it without installing an app.

Deliverables
PosterGraphic DesignAugmented RealityMotion Graphics
Type
University project (Commde, Chulalongkorn)

Research & Rationale

This project came from the "Wang Burapha Book District Design Lab," hosted by CEA. Our professors asked us to reinterpret the district's history in a contemporary way.

My concept was "knowledge that doesn't expire." In Nibhond's archives I found a 1993 book of 30 electronics projects. Its flat graphics, bright green background and bold Helvetica caught my eye straight away.

The idea was simple:if wiring up electronics felt like magic thirty years ago, augmented reality is the magic of today.

Process: Print Meets AR

I didn't want to copy the original cover, so I kept its strongest cues, the bold type and the bright green, and updated them with mixed typefaces and a modern layout.

Public installations have to work in seconds, so I built the digital layer as WebAR. There is no app to download; visitors just point a phone at the poster.

The poster was printed with spot green ink, which keeps the retro-futuristic feel of the 1993 original and also works as the trigger image for the 3D AR overlay.

The Delivery

At the design lab exhibition, over 200 people scanned the poster in the store and saw the AR layer. An old archive can still get people's attention.