Tag: typography

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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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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