If you want to learn Chinese font design well, you must understand the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western fonts

The French writer Voltaire once said: "Words are the portraits of sounds." Tracing back to the source, both Chinese characters and Latin characters are derived from pictographs. Chinese characters evolved step by step from oracle bone inscriptions, and then these pictographs evolved into the roots of character formation. People formed and recreated characters according to the rules of the "Six Books". After a long period of refinement, simplification and synthesis, they gradually developed. become the Chinese characters we use today. The originator of alphabetic writing is also hieroglyphs. From Egyptian hieroglyphs to Phoenicians created 22 consonants. Later, Greek letters and Slavic letters became the common source of various letters in Europe. Later, the Romans inherited Greek civilization. In Rome The basis of the alphabet completes the 26 letters in present-day English.

However, in the long course of the evolution of Chinese and Western characters, the development of the Western Latin alphabet itself has gradually deviated from its pictographic origin and developed into phonetic symbols. In the end, the shape is only an intermediary of information transmission and no longer has meaning in itself, while Chinese characters have always maintained The "imagery" function in the early stage of its creation finally formed the >

The difference between Chinese and Western fonts

The difference in font structure

The font structure of Chinese characters has two basic characteristics: one is square, all the fonts in calligraphy can be written in the rice grid;

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The second is to divide radicals into different structural features, such as characters with left and right structures and characters with up and down structures.

Chinese font structure

Latin fonts are different from Chinese characters. They are not square characters. There are wide and narrow, long and short, so the problem of structure is very important.

Western font structure

Chinese characters are relatively easy in graphic design and typesetting, because the width and height of each character are basically the same, while the width and height of Western letters are different. When writing sentences, the distance between letters will also change accordingly. There is a space before and after each letter, and certain letter combinations need to leave a specific space according to the needs of the design. Therefore, the size of these gaps needs to be carefully arranged by font designers when creating fonts.

Significant difference in complexity

From the perspective of modern font design, Chinese characters have always maintained the pictographic-based "form and ideographic" word-building method, and the number of single-character strokes and characters is extremely large. To develop a set of Chinese fonts, at least 6,763 commonly used characters need to be designed and 682 characters, the font design is more complex.

Chinese character library

Compared with Chinese characters, it is relatively easy to design Western characters in the form of Pinyin. The Latin alphabet only needs to design less than 200 letters, punctuation and symbols, thus forming a new complete set of character morphological systems with different styles.

Western font library

Different ways of forming characters

Compared with Western Latin characters, Eastern Chinese characters have significantly different ways of making characters. Chinese characters are ideographic characters. At the beginning of their creation, they were the reproducible expression of the images around them. Its basic feature is that each character has one shape, and the meaning of the word is often expressed from the shape; Meaning, unlike Chinese characters, each character has complex meanings, and its composition is much simpler than Chinese characters. Only more than 20 phonetic letters are combined to form a large number of words.

Have a different aesthetic

The basic fonts of Western characters are composed of arcs and straight lines. Each font has its own basic structure and decorative characteristics. However, the shape of Latin characters can only be regarded as "shape". Latin letters are more abstract shapes with no intrinsic meaning.

Chinese characters are "pictographic", and the glyph itself has information. Chinese characters focus on expressing meaning. In design, they often construct psychological harmony, and then externalize their pictographic meaning and natural characteristics. Therefore, Chinese characters have a unique beauty of imagery that Latin letters cannot match.

Carrying different cultural ideas

Chinese characters, as a kind of ideographic characters, not only reflect the natural shape, but also embody the Chinese people's comprehension of the laws of natural beauty and their extraordinary expressive ability. There is contrast in coordination and unity.

In the West, how to create a harmonious form is also the pursuit of ancient philosophers. They focus on the external form of aesthetic objects. The shape of Latin letters is simple in structure, easy to arrange and form a strong sense of rhythm, abstract and full of changes. In font design Has a good edge.

Common points of Chinese and Western font design

Although there are differences between Chinese characters and Latin characters in shape and writing style, in the application of artistic laws, Chinese characters and Latin letters are interlinked. When writing Chinese characters, we should pay attention to the principle of tight top and loose bottom, especially for Chinese characters with upper and lower structures. This is similar to the writing rules of Latin letters that emphasize the visual center. Generally, the visual center is a little higher than the absolute center to be comfortable. Similarly, both Chinese and Western font designs follow the principle of horizontal thinness and vertical thickness, so that the designed text has artistic beauty and will not cause visual fatigue.

Both Chinese and Western font design can be divided into two aspects: basic font (text font) design and creative font design. Even though the Latin alphabet is simple, it has strict design rules and aesthetic requirements, and has strong stroke and structural features. Some famous foreign colleges attach great importance to the basic structure training of font design and guide students to observe and compare the differences between letters. , to deepen the understanding of fonts. The design of universal Chinese character body fonts is more difficult than creative font design, because excellent body fonts are often similar to the current mainstream fonts, only some minor adjustments are made on some details of the characters, such as the foot of the characters. Therefore, designers should understand their respective shapes before drawing and writing. Only with a deep understanding of the structure of the font itself can it be possible to design excellent text fonts, and it is also possible to design fonts on the basis of mastering the principles of font structure. Creative deformation. It can be seen that whether it is the design of Latin letters or Chinese characters, the designer needs to spend a lot of energy to copy some classic fonts to achieve the purpose of deepening the understanding of the font structure.

Reference

・Xu Xuesong, Yang Zhao "Comparison of Chinese and Western Typeface Design"・Zhou Jianan " A Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Font Design Styles"