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Wu wenqi's AI Sealer Personalized Service System presents a compelling synthesis of cultural heritage preservation and contemporary technological innovation, rendered through a meticulously composed…

AI Sealer Personalized Service System by Wenqi Wu and Liang Hou is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2025 Golden A' Design Award in Cultural Heritage and Culture Industry Design Competition Category.


GoldCultural Heritage· 2025

AI Sealer Personalized Service System

by Wenqi Wu and Liang Hou

Client: Zhejiang University

Golden A' Design Award Winner in Cultural Heritage Category

54,755

Verified Award Winner

Verify Award Status for #165883

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The Design

About AI Sealer Personalized Service System

AI Sealer is a personalized seal design and carving system that combines traditional Chinese seal carving with intelligent manufacturing. Users create a seal in three steps: text input, character style selection, and layout adjustment. Deep learning models reproduce ancient seal characters in several traditional styles. An intelligent carving machine with automatic dust extraction and precise tool positioning completes the engraving in about five minutes. Each design can also be certified as a digital token or applied to items such as canvas bags and electronics.

The Recognition

About the Golden A' Design Award

AI Sealer Personalized Service System is a Golden A' Design Award winner, an immensely prestigious recognition granted to first-rate, marvelous, and outstanding designs. Golden winners are exceedingly innovative, visionary, and glamorously dazzling creations that reflect the prodigy, wisdom, and prowess of their designers. AI Sealer Personalized Service System is expected to be a highly praised, trendsetting, and monumental invention that delivers unprecedented value. This Golden A' Design Award-winning design is a spectacular, respected project that highly benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. AI Sealer Personalized Service System creates intense feelings of desire, evokes passion, encourages creativity, and fascinates us.

Where to Get It

Cultural Heritage Digitization Technology

We develop innovative systems that preserve traditional crafts through intelligent manufacturing and digital interfaces. Our award-winning research transforms complex heritage practices into accessible experiences, combining AI, automated production, and user-friendly design. Perfect for cultural institutions, museums, and organizations seeking to modernize traditional arts.

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Interviews

Grand Interview

Your innovative integration of deep learning models with traditional seal carving in the AI Sealer Personalized Service System represents a significant breakthrough in cultural preservation - could you elaborate on how you developed this fusion of ancient artistry with modern technology?

The process began with the digitization of ancient texts and historical records. This wasn't merely simple scanning; it involved building a vision-based knowledge database of seal characters. This extensive digital archive meticulously cataloged seal characters from various historical periods and stylistic schools, with each character's radicals carefully tagged. This provided a robust data foundation for our AI's learning.Next, we leveraged this rich database to train deep learning algorithms. These algorithms were specifically developed to reproduce the distinctive calligraphic styles of master carvers. They can precisely restore existing historical styles and also augment and enrich current Chinese character sets, offering users wider design choices.Finally, we brought this digital artistry to life through the intelligent carving machine. This system acts as a seamless cloud-connected bridge between the online and offline worlds, allowing users to remotely operate the carving machine and precisely engrave their designed seals. This remote operation capability significantly enhances the accessibility of this traditional art form, eliminating geographical and logistical barriers.Through these steps—from digitizing historical knowledge and intelligently reproducing styles to enabling remote physical creation—AI Sealer truly fuses the ancient art of seal carving with advanced AI technology, making it accessible and preserving its precious heritage for future generations.

The AI Sealer Personalized Service System makes seal carving accessible while maintaining authenticity - what specific challenges did you face in balancing user-friendly design with the preservation of traditional artistic elements?

First, there's the complexity of converting modern Chinese characters to seal script. The core of seal carving is zhuanshu, which differs significantly from contemporary characters. Our challenge lay in enabling users to input modern Chinese while still generating zhuanshu that aligns with traditional aesthetics. We trained a deep learning model on a vast collection of seal carving works, allowing it to intelligently convert modern characters into traditionally styled zhuanshu variations. We also offer various traditional font choices, ensuring the converted text is both recognizable and rich in ancient charm.Second, we faced the contradiction between popularization and artistic integrity. While making seal carving accessible is easy, doing so without diminishing its artistic quality is difficult. Our current solution offers a rich selection of traditional styles, emphasizing personalization over randomness. Through the intelligent carving machine, we aim to deliver a “what you see is what you get” seal carving experience, allowing users to visually transform their designs into reality. However, we acknowledge that current machine carving still has room for improvement in the knife mark aesthetic and compositional expression, not yet fully reaching the artistic standard of master seal carvers and retaining a somewhat rigid, industrial feel. Enhancing the machine’s performance in these artistic details is a key focus for our future research and development.Finally, we addressed the declining practical utility of traditional seals in modern society. With fewer traditional applications, making the art relevant to users today was a challenge. We don’t just offer physical seal production; we've also expanded its application scenarios, such as using designs on canvas bags or electronic products. The integration of NFT certification further enhances its digital collection value, significantly boosting seal carving’s relevance and appeal in contemporary society.

How does the AI Sealer Personalized Service System's three-step process of text input, font selection, and layout adjustment revolutionize the way people engage with seal carving as a cultural heritage?

First, it significantly lowers the barrier to entry, enabling “universal participation.” Traditional seal carving's long learning curve and demanding skill requirements are daunting. AI Sealer simplifies this complex design process into intuitive, user-friendly steps. This means anyone, regardless of artistic background or carving skill, can easily design a seal, greatly expanding the audience for seal carving culture and allowing more people to experience and appreciate this ancient art.Second, it shifts users from “passive reception” to “active creation,” significantly boosting cultural belonging. Historically, people often bought pre-made seals or commissioned artisans, acting as passive recipients. AI Sealer empowers users to become designers themselves, freely customizing text, fonts, and layouts for highly personalized results. This shift from consumer to creator fosters a deeper emotional connection with seal carving culture, transforming users from observers into active participants and inheritors of this heritage.Finally, the three-step process seamlessly integrates digital experience with physical creation, revitalizing tradition. The design is completed online, then effortlessly translated into a physical object by the intelligent carving machine. This blend of virtual and tangible not only broadens seal carving’s forms of expression and dissemination but also injects new life into this ancient art in the digital age. Users can even convert their designs into NFTs for digital collection, accelerating seal carving's cultural preservation and innovation.

Read the Full Interview

Behind the Design

Press Kit

Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.

Unique Properties
AI Sealer combines Chinese traditional seal carving craft with intelligent manufacturing machines. Users can easily create personalized seals personalized seals through a simple three-step process: text input, character style selection, and layout adjustment. Additionally, each seal creation can be certified as an NFT. Beyond digital design, users can physicalize their seals with our carving machine or apply their unique digital seals to products such as canvas bags and electronics.
Dimensions & Packaging
The app features a responsive mobile interface optimized for various screen sizes. The intelligent carving machine measures 421mm in length, 421mm in depth, and 457mm in height. It is made from high-quality materials such as magnesium-aluminum alloy, black PVC, aluminum, tungsten steel, stainless steel, and others to ensure durability, functionality, and performance.
Tags
Seal Carving, Intelligent Design, NFT, Traditional Craft, Modern Technology
Production Technology
AI Sealer use advanced deep learning models to replicate ancient seal characters in various styles, offering a personalized design experience. The system analyzes historical seal scripts, allowing users to choose from diverse traditional styles. The intelligent carving machine features automatic dust extraction and precise tool positioning, ensuring a clean, accurate engraving process. This integration makes traditional seal carving more accessible while preserving its authenticity and quality.
Design Challenge
Preserving and digitalizing traditional seal carving faces challenges due to differences between seal script and modern Chinese characters, complicating character conversion and recognition. The art requires precise microscopic carving, demanding exceptional control over stroke thickness and positioning. Additionally, the practical applications for seals have diminished, calling into question the modern relevance of this traditional craft. Addressing these issues requires a comprehensive approach that tackles technical digitalization while preserving artistic authenticity and developing new applications to maintain the craft's significance today.
Research
Seal carving, deeply rooted in East Asian traditional cultural heritage, faces significant challenges due to its complex process and the high level of skill required from practitioners. To preserve this ancient craft in contemporary society, we designed AI Sealer, a system that aims to simplify and modernize seal design through the integration of digital and physical applications while maintaining its artistic essence. Furthermore, AI Sealer establishes a new ecosystem that seamlessly connects design, production, and consumption.
Inspiration
Seal carving, a world-class cultural heritage, holds significance in East Asian culture but is fading due to its declining practicality and complex production. AI Sealer addresses this by combining intelligent manufacturing with user-friendly design, preserving the craft while making it accessible to the public. Users can participate in the design process without specialized knowledge, equipment, or skills.
Project Duration
The project started in Hangzhou, China, in December 2022 and was completed in Decemeber 2024.
Operation Flow
AI Sealer simplifies personalized seal creation. Users design their seals through an intuitive interface, customizing text, fonts, and layout. After finalizing the design, they select a carving machine via Google Maps and scan a QR code upon arrival. The machine then generates the toolpath, completing the precise carving in just five minutes. The finished seals serve various purposes, from stamping to art collections, with an option to convert designs into NFTs.
Patents
The above material comes from our own team.
Team Members
Creative Director: Wenqi Wu
Designer: Liang Hou
Designer: Hanshu Shen
Designer: Yehang Yin
Designer Researcher: Fengting Ge
Designer: Chongjun Zhong
Designer: Songruoyao Wu
Designer: Mingwei Chen
Designer: Zizhen Hong
Designer: Yanji Zhao
Programmer: Lvkesheng Shen
Programmer: Jiaxing Yu
Tutor: Kejun Zhang
Image Credits
The above material comes from our own team.

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