Seasons of the Lotus
Paper Engineering, Editorial Design
A Burmese Buddhist Calendar for 2025, discovering the flowers of the months in the shape of a lotus flower. This calendar blends traditional Burmese culture and Buddhism with contemporary design sensibilities, centered on the symbolic lotus flower.
When I heard serious play, I immediately thought of “Games” that you play. Linking it with identity, I thought about Burmese Board Games, Myanmar Identity. The idea about creating modernised/easy to recreate games/board-games/activities really struct because these days I missed playing a Burmese version of Carrom Board Game/Snooker. Since my country, Myanmar is in the middle of India, Bangladesh, Laos, Thailand and China, there are a lot of loaned and intertwined cultures, words, and even games. I thought about what other thing that ties us/Asian countries together is the Buddhism and the Buddhist Calendar.
Before thinking any further on the format, I designed on the A3 sheet of paper a full grid, proper layout, with illustration on the top and the calendar at the bottom corner. After rethinking about the format, to break from the ordinary A3 wall calendars, I researched and experimented how the core values of the Buddhism can influence this calendar layout.
Burmese Calendar is based on Gregorian Calendar with the added elements from Hindu Buddhist Calendar and Lunisolar Calendar which shows the moon phases and sun position. From Buddhism, I thought about the flower that represents Buddhism, which is the Lotus. Since I already have flowers in my design, I can get rid of the (festival) illustrations of the 12 months and only keep the 12 flowers. The shape of the lotus motif is a circular like any other Buddhist elements of Dhamma Wheels and life cycles. So I decided to make my calendar circular, which turned into a lotus with 8 petals during the development, which also aligns with the Burmese Zodiac system with 8 days (split Wednesday for AM and PM).