Category: Typography Design

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 there.

Update: Andrew West, the maintainer…

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Typography Design

Julius Hui’s eclectic Chinese typography Instagram stream

Posted on by Jason Li

Hong Kong-based typographer Julius Hui has recently started an Instagram account dedicated to Chinese type design with insightful and incisive bilingual commentary. Below we’ve captured our some of our favorites:

1.

Inspiration_Calligraphers in Qing dynasty are usually not recommended by scholars, they are always being criticised as ‘too rigid’ and ‘too robotic’.…

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Typography Design

Chinese fonts are really, really hard to make

Posted on by Jason Li

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…

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Typography Design

Kendra Schaefer’s Field Guide to Implementing Chinese Fonts in CSS

Posted on by Jason Li

Beijing-based designer Kendra Schaefer has created an incredibly valuable resource in writing up: Chinese Standard Web Fonts: A Guide to CSS Font Family Declarations for Web Design in Simplified Chinese. While you’d best head to Kendra’s site for the full details, we’ve included some highlights below:

Good Rules for Using Chinese fonts in CSS

Use the Chinese…

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Typography Design

Chinese etymology meets modern graphic design

Posted on by Jason Li

chineasy1

chineasy2

Entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh has teamed up with designer-illustrator Noma Bar to breathe new life into the age old practice of teaching kids Chinese characters using its pictorial etymology. And they need your support for their Kickstarter campaign.

Even though the campaign over sells itself (with prosaic catchphrases like “The real agenda behind…

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Typography Design

Featured design: Cover

Posted on by Jason Li

Update: It seems that magCulture is no longer selling this from its online store, and the originally linked-to review has gone missing.

Presenting Cover, a new magazine coming out of China by Mazzybox. (Anyone have more information about him/her? magCulture says that Mazzybox works at a studio called Deadline.)

The magazine’s second edition, pictured…

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Typography Design

A font that promises to balance Chinese and English

Posted on by Jason Li

A graduate school project by Vancouver-based designer Vince Lo, the Collator font purports to create a font that melds English letters and Chinese characters together into a non-jarring stream of text.

Collator is a typeface designed to achieve greater harmony between Chinese characters and Latin letterforms when set together. Drawing inspiration from the two traditions of…

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