Chinese fonts are really, really hard to make

Nikhil Sonnad has penned a great primer on Chinese fonts on Quartz called The long, incredibly tortuous, and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font. Much of the article describes the lengths designers must go to in order to create Chinese font:

The default set for English-language fonts contains about 230 glyphs. A font that covers all of the Latin scripts—that’s over 100 languages plus extra symbols—contains 840 glyphs, according to Březina. The simplified version of Chinese, used primarily in mainland China, requires nearly 7,000 glyphs. For traditional Chinese, used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the number of glyphs is 13,053.

An experienced designer, working alone, can in under six months create a new font that covers dozens of Western languages. For a single Chinese font it takes a team of several designers at least two years.

…

The difference is that, because of the vast amount of work involved, a Chinese typeface cannot be created by a single designer with a singular vision, as is often the case for Latin scripts. Instead a collaborative team has to start with this fuzzy notion and then settle on a uniform design.

Not to mention the fact that Chinese webfonts are too big to be downloaded on the fly – cloud-based systems have to scan an article beforehand to figure out which glyphs to deliver. (Of course, whether you should have webfonts in the first place is debatable.)

But as Nikhil reports, the demand is there. A Taiwanese crowdfunding campaign to create a new font for Taiwan exceeded its goal by 1629%.

For more information, read the full article on Quartz.