I decided to make a crest for my family, the DENG family. DENG is a transcription of 邓 (simplified Chinese character) or 鄧 (traditional Chinese character). My grandfather has told me that my family history can be traced back to 1880 since I was a child. However, I never thought that our ancestors had been lived in my hometown area for more than a thousand years until I start to work on this Skillshare project.
I came from a small county in China called Huaiji in ZhaoQing province. Even though I call it small county, there are still more than one million of the population in that town. Huaiji is famous for Yanyan, a beautiful cavern with an underground river runs through the cave. Every year, millions of Cave Swiftlet will come back to Yanyan and spend the summer inside the cavern.
Moreover, I look through the history of DENG surname, and I found the oldest totem of DENG, which was written in Chinese Bronze inscriptions. I decided to put an armor flag on this family crest because there was always a flag that marks the surname of the general during the war in ancient China.
I reorganized all those materials that I gathered. I did a quick sketch for the crest with a basic layout and then started to work in Illustrator. Here is the final version I came up with:
