Chinese font design skills! "Transformation" Dafa

Text/Zhang Yini Li Yutu/BaiDu

Font design has rich connotations, ever-changing design language and visual form, and has penetrated into almost every field of graphic design. It has become a new field of modern font design art to pay attention to the creative method of image and imagery in the expression form of text, and add graphic design of text to expand the expression space of text.

In the development of human society, language is produced in response to the needs of communication, and has become a medium to convey thoughts and feelings in the form of "sound". In order to record culture in the form of language, characters have been produced, which have a specific "sound" and express "meaning" in a specific "shape". In order to endow characters with a sense of beauty, a writing form that gradually surpasses the simple recording function of characters and uses decorative techniques to beautify characters has emerged as the times require. In the art of modern visual communication, font design shows unique artistic appeal in design fields such as book binding, commodity packaging, and display design.

Features of font design

Chinese characters are a new visual symbol following calligraphy and painting in the development of writing. They have both the image of pictures and the characteristics of sample representation of text, so that direct expression and indirect transmission are organically combined. In modern design, text can be used as a symbol of a specific situation due to the influence of its historical and cultural background. Therefore, in a specific design, fonts can become a purely aesthetic factor, playing the same decorative function as patterns and pictures. The font design of Chinese characters takes Chinese characters as the basic modeling elements, and recreates the design with content through partial ideographic and shape, so as to achieve the artistic expression of information dissemination. Recommended reading:Chinese character design skills! Pictograms

Various forms of font design "shape"

The font design of while taking into account the practicability, the shape of the font can be deformed according to the aesthetic principles of symmetry, balance, contrast, and rhythm. Personality and understanding of design works.

Deformation Variation

On the basis of the structure of Chinese characters, make strokes "articles", moderate expansion or contraction, intentional complexity and simplification, increase and province, break and connection and other variable factors to deal with, and you can also find the leading role Elements are decorated with graphics, textures, and feelings. For example, changes in strokes such as re-modification, regularity, radians, blanks, cuts, and divisions make Chinese characters show a special and novel image.

Specific composition is often based on printed characters or a set of fonts with the same shape is designed, and a few or one shape changes are made in one of the strokes or a certain part of a group of ligatures in order to achieve a "normal shape" The difference from the "abnormal shape" creates visual stimulation, creates a moderate "eye", forms a visual focus, breaks the monotony, and achieves unexpected, flat and lively visual effects.

Bringing flowers to trees

Replacement refers to the change or transformation of a certain Chinese character structure shape and shape or character-to-character; isomorphism is to find the relationship between the internal structure of things, so as to maintain the exchange of information, that is, "communication" to achieve the purpose of fusion. The heteromorphic isomorphism of Chinese characters is the formation of two different font structures into a complete character or character group, which changes the image of ordinary Chinese characters and re-releases the unexpected potential that the original meaning does not have. Replacement isomorphism is another visual expression language for embedding flowers and trees. Make full use of the characteristics of symbolization of Chinese characters and imagery of language, remove the redundant elements in the stroke information, and replace them with visual images to obtain a direct, clear and interesting glyph expression.

Reverse Correlation

"Positive shape and negative shape" is the application of the reverse psychological law of the bottom of the picture. Contour shapes are double-sided, like gears intersecting, forming their own complete shapes tightly according to a strict intersection line. However, sharing a shape as an inversion-related visual language has its limitations, that is, as a group of Chinese characters, it is necessary to have similar radical shapes, or to actively find strokes that can be used for each other, and create strokes that can be shared by the shape. , rationally arrange the remaining parts of this group of characters, so that they can all restore the original complete Chinese character form. Sharing a shape is a widely used form of creative Chinese character design due to the common use of strokes and structures of Chinese characters, resulting in interesting, symbolic, synthetic and popular forms.

Will virtual reality

Compared to the real space, the virtual space of Chinese characters complements each other, constructing a world where Chinese characters are inclusive and indistinct. The simplicity of strokes is the visual language expression of virtual reality in Chinese character design. By omitting the complicated strokes or detailed strokes of Chinese characters and keeping the key parts of Chinese characters, it can trigger the complete feeling of the character and achieve the visual effect of perceiving the whole with parts.

Breakdown Rebirth

The value of bringing the familiar to the unfamiliar and re-examining it lies in the birth of new life in the destruction. Disintegrate the original glyphs, and the configuration method created in the destruction is decomposition and reconstruction. Decomposition is to decompose the strokes of Chinese characters and present them in the form of points, lines, and planes; reconstruction means that Chinese characters no longer focus on individual perfection, and each stroke is recombined according to the law of beauty and the needs of space, resulting in a Chinese character. "Defamiliarized" to enhance visual appeal. This reconstructed image appears in an anti-conventional and anti-structural form, dilutes and eliminates the inherent semantics of the original Chinese characters, arouses new associations and logic, obtains the whole from the individual, and obtains the infinite from the limited. The text is looming, alternate between virtual and real, breaking through the conventional order and rules, and endowing it with a new visual expression.

Outside the knot

Modify and add patterns outside the strokes of Chinese characters, just like the branches growing out of the forest of Chinese characters, just like "branches growing out of knots". The added decorative graphics break through the artistic conception space of the original shape of the text, enabling the viewer to communicate with the information conveyed by the out-of-the-box shape when reading the strokes of the text, adding a decorative situation to the original thin visual thinking, and exaggerating the atmosphere. This decoration method that enriches the structure of Chinese characters highlights the formal sense of the font structure and the interest of the graphic language. When discovering and affirming the independent abstract beauty of the strokes of Chinese characters, the strokes are extended and twisted, rendering the characters rich, full and distinctive. atmosphere.

Conclude words with pictures

All forms of Chinese characters have specific meanings and shapes of characters and graphics, which can be regarded as regular and standardized graphics and shapes, and have the semantics of visual form. The skilled craftsmen of the Chinese folk never give up the decoration within the words. With the help of the calligraphy pen shape, they change the ink and black into Danqing, and the graphics are limited within the scope of the pen shape. They use rich and specific visual images as the strokes of Chinese characters. The meaning of the characters and the graphics complement each other. Conformal performance in the pen. From the formal point of view, drawing with characters uses characters as points, lines, surfaces, decorations, etc. to draw graphics, treats Changpian characters as countless points, accumulates points to form lines, and the dense form of points forms large and new Chinese characters on a plane Shapes or graphics are implicitly expressed in the straightforward and flat language, creating the artistic conception of words and pictures.

The purpose of font design--to achieve "meaning"

Using Chinese characters as the main design symbol, through the visual excavation of its ontological potential, and various methods to deal with it, no matter how rich the shape of the font is, the ultimate purpose of font decoration is to better reflect the design Thought, convey information, so as to achieve "meaning".

The design of the visualization of Chinese characters refers to the combination of concrete and abstract pictographs, a highly generalized expression method, grasping the typical characteristics of things, combining symbolic Chinese characters with the visual image of certain things, or turning Chinese characters into pictures Elements are used to express the artistic characteristics of vivid images. Abstract line symbols are also used to express the spiritual form of language and things. Expressed with self-aesthetic ideals, it vividly embodies the connotation of Chinese characters, and its shape and form convey the essence of beauty. The "meaning" of Chinese character design. Recommended reading:The way of Chinese characters! Application form and method in design

It is an inexhaustible treasure in the design field to use the rich "shape" changes of Chinese characters as design elements for logo design. Using Chinese characters as the elements of logo creative design provides endless creative space for logo design. Therefore, it is necessary to continue to study the design elements of the "shape" of Chinese characters, so that Chinese characters, a unique culture of the Chinese nation, can be imprinted with China's unique imprint in the field of world logo design art.