Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Arts, Design and Contemporary Education (ICADCE 2022)

Book design was no longer a simple beautification work long ago. And book design directly affects reading experience of readers and is also an intuitive and highly generalized display of text content and cultural connotations. As a kind of visual language, illustration plays an extremely important role in book design. In the development process of Chinese books, the illustrations of ancient books in different historical periods have different styles. For today's society which demands pluralism, the illustration elements in ancient Chinese books can provide rich visual elements for modern book design. In addition, through the innovative application of illustration elements of ancient Chinese books in modern book design, works with more unique Chinese national characteristics and styles can be created. “Catalog of Marine Creatures” was a set of pictures of ancient marine creatures drawn by painter Nie Huang during the Kangxi Reign of the Qing Dynasty. There are a lot of illustration elements in the catalog. The organic integration of these illustration elements of ancient books and modern book design will help promote the development of China's book design with cultural characteristics.