Typography Design

Forging a Hong Kong identity through fonts: mapping the city’s digital typefaces

Posted on by Jason Li

Hong Kong typography made global headlines in 2022 over a grassroots effort to preserve a font originally handmade by incarcerated people. The project aimed to create a new digital typeface, Prison Gothic, based on the way Chinese characters were written on the city’s road signs from the 1970s to 1990s, when they were hand-carved at the Pak Sha Wan Correctional Institute…

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Ethnography of Tech

Unofficial Rules of the Road for Americans on Rednote

Posted on by Jason Li

A drawing of the Rednote icon with shouty arms sticking out of it next to a smiling blob. Speech bubbles are coming out of the app icon with previews of some the rules outlined later in the article.

Last month, a wave of TikTok users flocked to Rednote (小红书) during its short-lived ban in the US, coalescing under the hashtag #TikTokRefugee. The Chinese social networking platform subsequently topped US mobile app store charts, and the predominantly Chinese-speaking and China-based users on Rednote welcomed their foreign visitors. As the latest episode from the 新新人类 Pixel Perfect podcast points out,…

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Housekeeping update for the bar

Posted on by The Editor

Hello readers! Just wanted to let you all know that we’ve taken down links to our Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as the email newsletter mirror of our RSS feed, since none of them are being maintained anymore.

We really did try to keep the email newsletter going, but a series of WordPress (and the affiliated Jetpack plug-in) updates over the past…

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Historical artifact: 汉字组字扑克 (Chinese character combination poker)

Posted on by Jason Li

A view of the box package for 汉字组字扑克 (Chinese character combination poker) from the top. The box is green and has various designs combining typography and illustrated playing cards.

Some photos of cards, showing how they might be combined by placing the cards next to or on top of one another.

I purchased this children’s educational card game in Penang, Malaysia in 2023. Its name is 汉字组字扑克, which roughly translates to “Chinese character combination poker.” This box set did not come with any instructions, but its name and design suggests it’s a kind of “扑克…

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Typography Design

Digitally Typesetting Rare, Ancient and Esoteric Chinese Characters

Posted on by Jason Li

The short answer

Install the BabelStone Han font, which supports “57,000 Han characters… [and] includes many rare or archaic characters that are not found in most CJK fonts” on your computer. Then look up the character on Unicode’s Unihan Database Lookup website (using the Stroke-Radical Index) and copy-and-paste it from…

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AI or no AI, China’s manufacturing engine to stay in the lead

Posted on by Jason Li

From Dan Wang’s China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum:

Americans are now integrating these [AI] tools into their lives. And they will start showing up in productivity statistics, perhaps even soon. The longer that most Chinese are unable to work with them, the greater the risk that China will be left behind in some way…

Though…

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There Is More Than One Chinese Language: Dictionaries for Cantonese, Teochew, Toisanese, Shanghainese, and more!

Posted on by Jason Li

A bird with a long beak and glasses reading a big thick book. Hovering near it area two browser windows and one phone screen that show different screenshots from different Chinese dictionaries

As we say in The Hanmoji Handbook, “Here’s the thing about spoken Chinese: it refers to many different languages — dozens, in fact — used by people in various parts of China, today and throughout history.” So when we discovered that the United Nations created an official, singular Chinese Language Day (celebrated annually on 4/20…

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Correcting the record (and oriental gaze) on Radiolab’s China Mixtape episode

Posted on by Jason Li
A soldier with red star cap and uniform holds up a casette tape and a machine gun, drawn in the style of a Communist China propaganda poster from many decades ago.
A still from Radiolab’s trailer for its Mixtape series (from Youtube)

Many moons ago, Krish Raghav raised some serious concerns about a Radiolab episode on the emergence of the rock music scene in China. “Framing China’s musical lineage as ‘Revolutionary operas to John Denver’ is such a frustrating half-truth,” he said, “[and] positing ‘western’…

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Innovating through manufacturing, the China way

Posted on by Jason Li

Dan Wang writes in Foreign Affair about how China is gaining ground over the US in the tech space by challenging the Western model where scientific discovery reigns supreme:

Unlike the West, China has grounded its technology sector not in glamorous research and advanced science but in the less flashy task of improving manufacturing capabilities. If Washington is serious about…

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Learning Chinese through emoji, and emoji through Chinese

Posted on by The Editor

The cover design for The Hanmoji Handbook flanked by some happy party face emoji

It’s just been two months since The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language Through Emoji was launched! The handbook is published by MITeen Press and authored by fellow 88 Bar contributors Jason Li and An Xiao Mina, alongside ⭐️ author Jennifer 8. Lee. What’s more, the book draws on their decade of experience writing about technology,…

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