2310 completed translations from the archive. Articles retain their original publication dates.
We asked working professionals from design and the creative fields to recommend their favorite designs of 2015, taking stock of the year's products so that genuinely good design reaches a wider audience.
IKEA, Uniqlo, Nike, Gucci, BMW, Marriott, iQiyi, SOHO China, Taikoo Li, Microsoft, Amorepacific, Wagas
Divided into two groups — one for architecture and interior design, the other for product design.
How did you feel after watching it?
With its old ways of advertising and selling both losing force, how can P&G find a new way to market itself and reach a new generation of young consumers?
We tried to pin down five things young people will pay for. That is how business works.
This article is published with the permission of Luo Yihang, who runs the WeChat account "Tolstoy Party" and also founded the tech outlet PingWest.
From corporate strategy to marketing tactics, online and offline, car brands have pounced on anything that touches young people.
Like Old Qian of Maque Washe, the people who built this industry out of sheer love of play can no longer afford to play.
Good ads do more than celebrate creativity. They also show how advertising, and society, are changing.
Come to think of it, what self-indulgent nonsense is all this?
We tested six brands — Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, Anta, New Balance and Skechers — to see how "geeky" they really are.
The advertising ceiling is near. This is the moment Google has no choice but to change.
First comes the “Heartthrob Season,” built around three productions starring fan favorites Benedict Cumberbatch (“Juanfu” to Chinese fans), Tom Hiddleston (“Dou Sen”) and James Franco (“Fu Lanlan”). Next is the “Awards Season,” with plays such as *The Audience*. Next year brings a “Shakespeare Season” of the classics.
The "O2O" that Nuomi, Dianping and Meituan now talk about constantly looks a lot like another group-buying war.
Caught between the shifting fortunes of content and distribution, Disney still needs more great content and more new channels.
There will always be a market for good design at a fair price.
Convenience stores are growing while the rest of retail shrinks, and behind them lies painstaking work in reading people's minds.
This is the first time China has imported live cattle, and it did so for one reason: to eat them.
Has the world of serialized web fiction changed? No — what has changed is everything about how good content gets run. On that, "Nanpai Sanshu" may be one of the people best qualified to speak.
The competitors and the shareholders have changed, but the rules of the online ticketing game have not.
It has never had a million-copy bestseller, and it doesn't even have a full-time accountant — so how has this literary business called Duku come this far?
In a noisy year for online video, deep-pocketed capital stood behind every power play, and the barrier to entry kept rising.
Having grown from Taobao shops into brands, snack e-commerce companies have moved from cultivating consumers to fighting over them.
Whose ad is the most creative? Who is just being clever? And what does it all mean?
Niu Jian and his shipping-container story are no longer news. What we wanted to know was the state of mind people bring to talking about this way of life, and we have tried to show it as fairly as we can.
Its founder has just died. A good moment to look at what kind of company he actually built.
Fosun, the group he founded, may be the most active Chinese investor overseas.
Judged by box-office growth alone, Le Vision Pictures has done well in recent years. But if it wants to become a truly big company, its current playbook won't last.
The golden age when one department store clerk looked after three customers at once is long gone. What did department stores do wrong, or is everything they do wrong?
This is a business built on curiosity, courage and intelligence. But then, what cool business doesn't need those?
"It may look vulgar, but there's something deep in it too."
This industry seems to exist to help people fight the damage that time and the environment do to them. Now the companies have to solve that problem for themselves first: how do you stop aging?
Coca-Cola's contour bottle has now been around for 100 years.
Baozi — about as street food as street food gets — are hard to picture as a big business. When Tong Qihua said, “I think baozi have extraordinary commercial potential,” everyone laughed. He runs the baozi chain Bao Bao, which sells more than 200,000 buns a day in Shanghai and Hangzhou.
IKEA has been slow to sell online, but the furniture industry has not waited for it. Cheap furniture was the first to find its market on the internet, and ambitious online brands that want to sell quality may soon get their chance.
1. Bakugai ("explosive buying")
Every weekend, QDaily picks a theme and goes looking for great designs.
When it comes to shopping, national borders matter less than they used to
It has lost its biggest customer and missed mobile, so Firefox has few chances left. That does not erase what it gave us.
This is part of QDaily's year-end "youthification" series. Here we look at how fast fashion, a business built on young people, changed this year.
TV money, pushed along by big capital, turned the Premier League into a money machine. Now the Chinese want in.
This is part of QDaily's year-end "youth" series. We look at the biggest change in China's TV drama industry this year.
Part of QDaily's year-end "Getting Younger" series: a look at the biggest change in China's TV drama business this year.
The same old problem of balancing "cool" between the mainstream and the niche. Look at how his magazine, his store and his own brand answer it.
It is always hard to say exactly when a change began, but this much is now fact: the big-name chocolates on supermarket shelves are losing ground to premium brands.
"When we look back on our youth, even the stupid things we remember are beautiful. We would never say, 'Hey, how many abortions did I have?' You know what I mean?" That is what the director of *Our Times* told us when we interviewed her.
Zhang Dazhong, CEO of Alibaba Sports, says he wants to build the foundational platform for China's sports industry. What does that mean?
People are growing warier of what they put in their mouths. Small companies saw it first; now the slow-moving giants are finally catching up. How did we get here with food?
This article tells you what it has done for design.
Freitag is one of the best examples of "making not just a product, but a brand." Here is how it won its fans, and how it keeps them.
In the world of Moments, Daxiang Gonghui's writing is serious and "deep" — a little abnormal. Its founder, Huang Zhangjin, set that style, and it has "pierced through" a great many people.
Zhang Jiayin is a street-style photographer. He doesn't shoot the odd characters you usually see in the media.
"A computer on every desktop"
Elena Pacenti taught for years at Domus Academy, the renowned Italian design school, and she has a few things to say.
We need Monsters, Inc. and Wayne Enterprises. We need Superman to found a new Boeing and a new Calvin Klein. And Coca-Cola, Nike and Armani might consider buying the companies from the Spider-Man, Ant-Man and Hulk stories. Here is what they are.
If someone kept a list of "words every company covets," it would include "crossover fashion show" alongside "virtual reality" and "organic." Most of these shows have nothing to do with fashion, and they are not aimed at the big international buyers. Some look so unlike a normal fashion show that the designers have to print "XX Fashion Show" in large letters on the clothes to make the point.
The architect Zhuang Ziyu thinks that is what architecture is: "If you start out with something that has a lot of force to it, you can give up pieces of it along the way. But if what you start with isn't strong enough, you may end up with nothing at all."
Toy Story pushed animation, and film itself, into an era completely unlike the one before it.
Mitch Altman invented TV-B-Gone, and he was one of the people who pushed the maker movement along in its early days.
As long as Li Lin is in charge, JNBY and its sister brands will struggle to become mass-market names. That may not be a bad thing.
Two names are impossible to leave out of the clutch bag's history: Napoleon's Empress Josephine, and Van Cleef & Arpels.
At this year's Singles' Day, what showed Alibaba's potential was not that it sold more things.
As a work tool it still falls short of a Mac, but writing a few thousand words or drawing an illustration on it is no longer a chore.
Liang Feng wants to know whether the market will give him a chance, but he won't lower himself to meet it — he has refused mass production, and he has no plans to copy the Japanese lacquerware young people love. Best case, someone pays a high price for his work, the way people buy a piece of contemporary art they can't quite make sense of.
Be kind to yourself, be kind to your to-do list, be kind to everyone you work with. That is about all the (chicken-soup) cure for procrastination amounts to.
In the power shift after the Meituan-Dianping merger, the outside world seems to care about only one person: Wang Xing.
In his new book *The Glass Cage*, Nicholas Carr argues that as machines grow smarter, people have fewer and fewer chances to sharpen their own skills. We don't entirely agree.
From a way of life to a fashion trend, Bohemian style is now everywhere. Ah, this vain and shallow world.
Its products, marketing and store locations all have problems, and American shoppers still hold the same stereotypes about Japanese brands. Uniqlo has run into one difficulty after another in the United States.
The working week is over, but beating procrastination has no finish line.
Not really
Regular article
She gives the runway show a special meaning, in a very literary turn of phrase: "a kind of self-examination with the space stripped away." She is also called one of the most commercially mature designers in China.
This is a Starbucks play. Behind its relentless promotion lies the fear of falling behind.
The method is "bird by bird." Read on and you'll see what that means. Don't put it off! Finish reading now!
With *Spectre* about to open, wherever you look on Mr. Bond, everything he wears or touches seems to be worth a fortune.
Want to know how refined life has become? Look at how the things around you are wrapped.
When it comes to taking photos, most people think first of a smartphone, not a camera.
Today's biggest problem: we tried to work with total focus for a fixed block of time (one Pomodoro), and kept getting interrupted, sometimes by others, sometimes by ourselves.
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the Palace Museum, and the 10th year Zhao Guangchao has spent studying the Forbidden City. "If something moves you," he says, "and you don't do anything about it, heaven takes it back and gives it to someone fit to hold on to that feeling."
Most people who buy Happy Meals probably don't know this. What kind of business lies behind it?
Regular article
With this column, QDaily Business History, we want to tell you how the world got to be the way it is today.
His startup wants to solve problems like this one: there are already 600 coffee pots on the market — if you're going to make one more, how exactly do you do it?
Bored people talk about "leftover women" every day, but in China and the US alike, it is mostly men who pay
With BAT and other deep-pocketed players moving in, Gewara has lost its lead in market share. What new methods and strategies can it find?
Founders who set out to solve their own problems are often the source of markets that seem to come from nowhere.
Plenty of people say he looks like Shun Oguri, but an architect can't make a living on good looks.
He runs a tech company and Laurel Films, holds guest professorships at seven universities, and still finds time to throw parties with his many friends. But in the end, you know his name because of that stack of art-house films.
Star Wars is a hit around the world. Here is why, in China, it "lacks a mass base."
You may never have heard of many of these games: they are pixel-art titles in 48 colors that swept the Famicom last century.
The songs are about love and sex — and, seen from another angle, they are a history of American society.
The way Surface has changed over the past three years tells the story of how Microsoft itself has changed.
This company still has a lot to show us
Mobile payments, e-commerce, internet finance, on-demand home services, online video... and definitely not artificial intelligence
You may not like Liu Qingyang's designs, but you can't deny that she has found a path of her own through a crowded, complicated market.
Regular article
Come see how big data changed the movie business.
Xu Wei is always tinkering with his music, but "the next album may be three years away. At least three years..."