With the successful application of the National Art Foundation (general project) for the dissemination and promotion of the project "The Modern Road of Chinese Character Design Art Exhibition", and through the systematic organization of the digital content of Chinese characters, we found that the research on typeface design used to be fragmentary, mostly in the form of graphic design and glyph design, and how Chinese characters complete the The course of modernization has been an unresolved issue.
Among them, the history of Western typography and design theories are crucial to the study of the modern history of Chinese characters, especially the technical issues of Latin character design, which can backfire on aesthetics and quickly translate into research methods and visual laws that span across the textual genre. In this article, I will discuss the methods and laws of typography under the title of "Six Points of Typography".
Point 1: One of the most easily forgotten elements by type designers - the orthography that defines the standardization of text
Chinese fonts need to face a huge character set first. It is called huge not only because of the large number of characters, the many strokes of individual characters, and the many variants of characters, but also because different countries and regions in East Asia have different glyph standards. The number of characters is difficult to define and difficult to count, and the number is still increasing if we refer to the number of bits in the international character set. In order to deal with this almost infinite collection, the relevant ISO working group has set up a Chinese character study group to deal with the process of collecting Chinese characters. For the standardization of Chinese characters, the issue has been taken seriously throughout Chinese history, and the country has promulgated many GB standards since the founding of New China. Without a careful understanding of orthography, it is likely that the wrong Chinese characters will be designed or used. Whether it is designers or users, at the present time when "everyone is a font designer", the awareness of orthographic characters should be popularized, which is not only the basic literacy of a Chinese person, but also the basic respect for culture. The use of characters, especially in more official or serious content, requires special attention. It should be said that orthography is not a terminology, but it is crucial for people who make and use words.
Point 2: OpenType features make it possible to distinguish between characters and glyphs
OpenType fonts are based on Unicode, and each symbol has its own fixed position and name. fonts in OT format do not necessarily have OpenType features. A designer understands and distinguishes the concept of characters and digital glyphs is the foundation of modern type design learning. For example, orthographic characters, there are orthographic characters and there are variant characters that can be used interchangeably, so in the context of Unicode, a character can correspond to different digital glyphs. Under the OpenType feature, the font becomes with design diversity, for example, the text can be replaced with a combination of numeric glyphs, which can be understood as a set of hyphenated glyphs in the figure; it can also be replaced with more appropriate numeric glyphs according to different contexts need, and the replacement adds the starting and outgoing strokes to make the text look more natural and beautiful; it can also change the style of the text according to different contents of the text Through comparison, we can feel the tonality of the whole word changed after the replacement.
Point 3: Unicode tells you: the difference between drawn characters (Emoji) and emojis
Digital fonts have their own code for each character stored in the computer. In the past, one system with one set of code and parallelism of different systems would lead to confusion of information. In order to identify different languages, languages and symbols, Unicode, an international code system, was created to accurately record data consisting of language characters (e.g. a piece of text) and transfer it across systems. As a simple example, a scholar who uses his own computer's installed font of Khitan characters (which is currently not encoded in Unicode) to make a presentation file for a lecture abroad, and plays it on a local computer there, the Khitan characters on the presentation file will be garbled. The author, on the other hand, used encoded Chinese and Latin characters for this article, and sent it to the editor in a word document without any fear of displaying it incorrectly due to not having the font on my computer.
Unicode is a bag that contains a lot of content, including not only the language characters in use, but also some extinct characters, such as Xixia, and Unicode also accommodates the picture characters we mentioned today. This means that the file format of the emoji is the same as the font format, which means that the emoji (and the emoji made up of characters turned on by Professor Scott Farman) can be sent or stored via WeChat, email, SMS, etc. without changing his meaning or showing garbled code. The problem then is that the emoji does not have its own Unicode code bit and is not part of the font format, it is simply localized for display. This issue is important because some beginners simply can't tell the difference between the two, and so the descriptions flow on the surface of the design, without seeing the data properties of the drawn text.
Point 4: Writing is important for any type of script design
Script is a word that means both a type of writing and a style of writing and handwriting. This point is as comical as if a word is talking to each other. All scripts originate from writing, and thus many of the terms of the genre come from writing, and Chinese characters are no exception. However, the terminology of our calligraphy is not the same as that of other scripts in the world, so we cannot directly copy Latin terminology, such as "zhonggong". The term "Zhong Gong" is similar but not identical to the Western concept of "x height", and we have never been able to find a suitable English translation, so we use pinyin to translate it. For left-right structured characters or up-down structured characters, we can roughly use the second center line to visualize "Zhong Gong".
The same happened in Latin, where the alphabet changed from the old Roman cursive to the new Roman cursive (the new Roman cursive is the prototype of the modern lowercase alphabet), i.e. the lowercase alphabet was born from the rapid handwriting of the upper case alphabet, and the slanted Italian style was formed by the rapid writing of the Roman The Italian style was also formed by the rapid writing of the Roman style, which became the second style. The original italic style of Chinese did not exist, and this mechanical tilt may be attributed to photographic typesetting, while the stylistic styles of Chinese characters that express handwriting and speed are running script and cursive script.
Writing is a hidden gene in fonts, so even geometric style fonts are also related to writing. The book "How to create fonts: from sketch to screen" once gave an example of Futura fonts to illustrate this point. The book "How to create fonts: From Sketch to Screen" gives an example of Futura fonts to illustrate this point. In the book, Albrecht Dürer's work describing the typeface in abstract geometry is described as a confident creation. However, such illustrations do not really adequately describe the glyphs of the capital letters in the text. The proportions of the letters in these schemes do not apply to the printed typeface. The real value of these drawings is that they tell us something about humanist thinking: an attempt to describe the glyphs through mathematical methods.
Understanding the writing of Chinese characters, especially calligraphy, will enable us to understand the stroke order of Chinese printing fonts and the specific stroke characteristics derived from it. The basic strokes of Chinese characters, according to the "Design of Living Script (Preliminary Draft)", include "dot", "horizontal", "vertical", "apostrophe", and "down". ", "down", "hook", "pick", and "fold", which are the eight basic strokes For example, "hook" includes "horizontal hook", "vertical hook", "diagonal hook" and so on. Many font manufacturers and experienced font designers have their own libraries of components. For the design of fonts, most of the font libraries should have a set of correct strokes in order to be used in some formal occasions or for educational purposes. The current font design market does not strictly adhere to the standard, and even some companies' custom fonts also have irregular strokes, in order to highlight some recognition, at the expense of the text specification, which is a noteworthy problem.
Point 5: The word cavity word punch (Counterpunch) hides the history and secret of Latin type design
The tool of Counterpunch has not appeared in the vast history of Chinese printing fonts, and no Chinese scholars have done any special research on it. This technique, because of its long distance from modern Latin type design, has also been nearly sunk in the West. It was the Dutch type historian Fred Smythe who put it together and published it in 1997 through technical restoration - bringing out the technical principles, technical advantages and importance of it to the world. A cavity is the inner white space of a letter, and a cavity word punch is a word punch that stamps the inner white space of a letter, i.e., shapes those negative forms that are not involved in printing. The Latin alphabet has quite a few letters with close negative space, so the word cavity punch is used for several related letters, for example, the word cavity punch used to make the d's in Van den Keel's 11-point roman script is used 9 times more (b, p, q and all versions with pronounced symbols). So the engraver did not need to engrave these letters individually one by one, and it was difficult to keep these shapes consistent by hand, so the Latin script constructed its own internal logic very early on. The cavity character punch is not only used to make one character in a set of lead characters, but also several characters with different font sizes with the help of the same set of cavity character punch, so the secret of the high efficiency of Latin design and casting is it compared with Chinese engraving.
Point 6: Typographic color, optical size and contrast
The number of strokes in Chinese characters varies greatly, and the issues of layout grayscale and visual size are prominent. Unlike other languages, Chinese characters are infinitely divided in a fixed finite space. The combination of all the radicals and components resembles a Lego toy; no matter how many parts it has, they must all fit into a specific, uniform character body frame, so designing particularly complex glyphs is like a game. This means that the problem of layout grayness is particularly pronounced in Chinese characters, and sometimes enlarging the face rate (the ratio of the face frame to the body frame) is also a way to adjust the layout grayness. It can be said that the grayscale of Chinese characters can never be as uniform as in other languages. Therefore, in order to adjust the grayness, the thickness of the strokes of the same character weight (especially for Regular and thicker weights) often varies greatly depending on the number of strokes.
In modern applications, whether in print or electronic devices, the font size used for Chinese characters is sometimes smaller in order to fit more information into a limited space, so that the problems of visual size and layout grayscale come to the fore. Historically, a better printing font to solve both of these problems was the Juzhen Song font. The Song-like font is the structure of regular font and the pen shape of Song font. Now let's take a closer look at the Juzhen Imitation Song sample, and I find that my previous description of it is more stylistic. The reason why this glyph of Juzhen Imitation Song font is suitable for body reading is not because of its style, but because of its relatively low contrast between the thickness of the strokes. The Juzhen Imitation Song font has the traditional orthographic and clip-note characters commonly used in ancient books. The style of clip-note characters is usually half the width of orthographic characters, so the requirement for clarity of text is higher, and the clip-note characters of Juzhen Imitation Song font are designed to be almost visually consistent in thickness horizontally and vertically, and such treatment is strikingly similar to some contemporary design theories, such as Dwiggins' M guidelines. In contemporary times, we are also surprised to find that a font manufacturer has released a Chinese font that challenges small font sizes. This design uses the exclusive research and development of very small font technology to solve the font in various packaging printing, ultra-small fonts and other areas of application, so that these words can be very clear display and printing.
There are many more points about typography. In recent years, our font design research and products have made great progress, whether it is the number of published papers, creations, IP creation of font design or font products are increasing. However, from the above several points of discussion, I found that the level of domestic printing font design and application in the computer era mentioned back then has a gap with foreign countries, lagging behind the development of graphics and images. Keywords from the computer era into the Internet era, the emphasis on practice rather than theory, content rather than context, and form rather than technology has improved, but still needs to be improved. In view of this, the author calls for the continuous maintenance of a good environment for the development of Chinese printing fonts as well as the application system, and the design and promotion of more excellent multi-language fonts to meet the needs of modern design. This involves the issue of cultural heritage, which can be said to be both a social need and a social responsibility. We are in an era of development toward screen media-based Internet, especially since the outbreak of the epidemic, and everyone has embraced digital life almost overnight. As the main carrier of our information dissemination - Chinese characters, drawing on traditional print font design and focusing on its scientific, humanistic and aesthetic nature is a goal that every font designer always needs to pursue.
Article Source:艺术与设计
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