From the perspective of Chinese character design, the square grid became closely associated with the writing of Chinese characters as late as the Bronze Age, and the beauty of Chinese characters as "square characters" was finally established after the creation of the regular script with its dotted structure. Since the Tang and Song dynasties, the Tianzhi, Jiu Gong, and Mi Zi grids have gradually become the basic framework for Chinese calligraphy practice, and they continue to do so today. Studies have found that these seemingly simple grids are not an "even" distribution of areas and forces, but rather highlight a centered "middle house consciousness".

The Nine-Gong Grid was modified by Chen Xiezeng in the Yuan Dynasty and Jiang Ji in the Qing Dynasty to accommodate the needs of calligraphic study, but the emphasis on the "middle palace" was not weakened by this evolution. This emphasis on the zhonggong in Chinese calligraphy theory before the age of lead type constituted a substrate for the aesthetics of modern Chinese characters, and had a significant impact on the design of later engravings in books and lead type. Behind this zhonggong consciousness, in fact, lurks the temporal consciousness of the Chinese people since ancient times, which has become, so to speak, an aesthetic archetype, an aesthetic unconscious. This psychological aesthetic archetype has not been lost due to the development of media technology and changes in culture and social life, and until today, in the digital age, the emphasis on zhonggong consciousness in screen-based Chinese font design still has its tenacious vitality.

Of course, the type design of Chinese characters has been adapting to the changes of the times. Especially in modern times, with the change of lead type technology and type design process, the type design of Chinese characters has become more conventional with the ways and methods of Western design. Instead of limiting the vitality of Chinese characters in a grid based on geometry and mathematical logic, they exude more diversity and vitality. This is evidenced by the large number of new Chinese characters in the digital age and the creation of reproduction fonts. The Qing Dynasty calligrapher Liu Xizai once proposed the concept of "living Jiu Gong". In fact, the "live" of Jiu Gong is also the "live" of grid design, and the key is that the designer should make flexible adaptations according to the goals and functions of the design. When we emphasize the traditional writing and humanistic characteristics of Chinese characters, the "tightening of the middle palace" is an important aesthetic basis for connecting the traditions; while when we emphasize the functionality and effectiveness of Chinese characters as a kind of written information exchange, the designer does not need to put the "middle palace "is an important aesthetic basis for connecting with tradition. If we look at the issue of "Zhong Gong" from the perspective of the longer history of Chinese character development, we can also get a perspective that a "living" Zhong Gong, a "changing" Zhong Gong, is obviously more important than a "dead" Zhong Gong. It is obvious that a "living" and "changing" Zhonggong is more conducive to the diversification of Chinese font design than a "dead" and "unchanging" Zhonggong, and is also more conducive to the visual communication and information dissemination of Chinese characters in general.

The changes in Chinese typography and layout are more a reflection of changes in the way information is disseminated and in the technology of the medium than of the close connection between the design of Chinese typefaces and cultural traditions. Before the age of lead type, we find that the grid system in Chinese type design was already highly developed in books of the jianji system, and the "grid" created by the unique way of weaving bamboo and wood jianji even had many interesting interactions with the text editing of the text. All this deepens our understanding of the grid system in the early Chinese book system. The basic grid pattern of the booklet system was inherited by the scroll system, as exemplified by the "wusi bar". The later scroll system took the previous grid system one step further in the engraved and movable type plates, and not only the vertical system of the "wusi bar" was further standardized and standardized, but also the horizontal system in the language of the plates was fixed in the design of the "flower grid" and movable type plates. was fixed. After the era of lead type, generally speaking, the Chinese book system underwent a paradigm revolution from "wire-bound books" to "foreign-bound books", that is, the transition from the traditional Chinese book system to the modern book system dominated by Western books. In this process, the variety of fonts and font sizes gradually increased and became increasingly standardized in order to meet the far greater demand for the dissemination of textual information than in the past. The basic grid of book layouts also became increasingly elaborate and fine-grained. Changes in opening and type standards, as well as the introduction of modernist typographic concepts, led to an increasingly rich and diverse language of layout and grid design in modern Chinese books. The period from the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century was a time of great variety in the book system and layout language in China. However, the thousands of years of tradition of writing, typesetting, and reading Chinese characters "straight up and right down" did not fundamentally overturn this basic arrangement of Chinese characters for nearly a hundred years after the advent of the lead type era, until the 1950s when Chinese characters were It was not until the 1950s, when the "straight" to "horizontal" layout of Chinese characters was fixed, that the layout and typography of Chinese characters became fully compatible with the Western layout and grid system. This seemingly overly rigid and disruptive change in Chinese information dissemination actually paved the way for Chinese to enter the information age later. The Chinese information we receive today on our desktop web pages and cell phones is fully compatible and synchronized with the Western language grid system. It is the flexibility and adaptability of the Chinese character as a "square" grid unit - straight from the right, horizontal from the left - that allows the communication of information in Chinese characters in the digital age to remain in the digital age.

Today, we are in the midst of the information age and the flood of digital media, where technology is changing rapidly and the methods of digital media technology and design have also developed rapidly. By analyzing the process of digital media technology and design application grid design in recent years, it must first be acknowledged that the methods, means and design patterns of interaction design, interface design and digital media design first matured and developed in the United States, and then became a global design phenomenon. In our analysis, we also found that, except for the design of Chinese characters themselves, which will retain traditional aesthetic patterns, the grid design language used in their interaction design is globalized, both on the web and on mobile. At present, it is difficult to find a grid design language with truly Chinese cultural characteristics and originality. The revolution of Chinese characters from straight to horizontal typography has in fact laid an important foundation for the future typography of Chinese characters to be in line with the world. transmission of visual information. In this process, the highly orderly and reasonable grid design pattern provides the basic guarantee for this information transmission, and grid design languages like basic grid and list are not created in the digital era, as we can see in the previous article that their history can be traced back to the era of Jin Shi text and simple documents. In Chinese type design, we can also see that the traditional concept of emphasizing the sense of the middle palace still plays its cultural inertia advantage and aesthetic charm in the era of digital grid. The beauty of Chinese characters has not been completely subjugated to mathematics and logic by the arrival of digitalization. Although the design method of Chinese character fonts has been globalized because we use the same tools as those of English, Chinese characters are still Chinese characters, and Chinese characters still do not have the baseline of phonetic characters. The layout of Chinese characters can be integrated into the globalized grid system on the one hand, and on the other hand, it can resurrect and revive people's memory of the graphic history of the past in some unique design projects that emphasize Chinese cultural characteristics. All these show that Chinese characters still have a strong vitality and dynamism in the digital age.

In today's world, "grid" can be said to be ubiquitous. For modern people, there is no doubt that we have been highly gridded. From the spiritual to the physical realm, from window panes to tables, there are grids everywhere. The grid order confuses us because it makes regulations and restrictions, but also brings the possibility of freedom and creativity. We see in the historical context of information dissemination in Chinese the flexibility and adaptability of the typography and layout of Chinese characters in the midst of historical change. This change reflects the very relationship between the subjective power of human action and order. The grid is important for the communication of Chinese information, but for design, it is even more important and must be pointed out: in addition to the "material", we must also "seek the heart", because only the "heart" of design "can help us break through the rigid order and seek the possibility of access and change.

Article Source:艺术与设计

版权声明：【除原创作品外，本平台所使用的文章、图片、视频及音乐属于原权利人所有，因客观原因，或会存在不当使用的情况，如，部分文章或文章部分引用内容未能及时与原作者取得联系，或作者名称及原始出处标注错误等情况，非恶意侵犯原权利人相关权益，敬请相关权利人谅解并与我们联系及时处理，共同维护良好的网络创作环境，联系邮箱：603971995@qq.com】