About a year ago I move to Hong Kong from Costa Rica, in this crowded city I found many inspiration topics to do graphics, like lighting, statues, languages etc, but one of the biggest changes for me was Asians in self. I admire that many aspects of Asian culture that makes them unique, having that many different things around I was about to get crazy, even this simply every day stuff when I was traveling in the metro, walking in a street or wherever else, in my mind I was asking the same question:

What’s in the Asian face that makes them look Asian?

In all Asia are lots of cultures, ethnic groups with different characteristics, so I not ease to say Asians all together have this or that. So I try to look for major groups to talk about main groups.

The GREG project (https://icr.ethz.ch/data/greg/) give me an idea of spread of groups of people and major ethnic groups across Asia.

The project to geo-reference ethnic groups conducted by Weidmann, Nils B., Jan Ketil Rød, and Lars-Erik Cederman in 2010 was very useful as a start point and to get a better understand of the topic. I use also plastic surgery medical articles to understand the structures and as a complement I collect samples of those major ethnic groups mentioned in the GREG project and Joshua project.

Schemes of the article Blepharoplasty Plastics Surgery by Mark A. Codner and Renne M. Birke. 

This are the samples of eyes of the major 63 ethnic groups in Asia based in data from GREG & Joshua projects 

I use the eye samples to create a graphic measuring the eyelid gap, inclination and length of the eyes based in the same iris size of each sample, the idea was to show that some times the inclination makes look narrower the eye.

Bottom section of the graphic showing from the narrower eyes to the wider gap.

I have to say that the suggestions and support of Marcelo Duhalde in this graphic makes the project a better final product. I believe that show the work and talk without filter is the best to create a better graphic, is a fresh new point of view and will improve your ideas.

Graphic process from sketch to published version

The online version of this graphic was the same information as the print, it have a small variations in the mobile including a few different graphics and shorted storytelling but at the end was just jpg images.

The funny part of this was that this graphics stays for a few days as the most read article of the scmp website and shared more then 10k times.

Print full page version, desktop version and mobile version on the day of publication.

For this project I did the research in free short times in between other projects. I did keep hold this information for about a year awaiting for a chance to work on it and publish because we are just a few in our unit and there are many projects in the way. The production time was about a week, plus an other 10 days of research spread in to short times in a year.

Take a look in to the pint version in our print arcade:
http://multimedia.scmp.com/culture/article/SCMP-printed-graphics-memory/

Our in the online version released on July 04 2017:
http://www.scmp.com/node/2100532/