Yang Linqing: Me and Chinese Fonts

Founder Yellow Grass and Founder Thin Gold Book (from "Chinese Typeface Application Manual I")

Ideal Country Press

Enthusiasm and interest in typography have developed rapidly in recent years.Recently, we are very honored to invite well-known domestic designerMr. Yang LinqingOpen a workshop. Not long agobefore he teamed up with the world's largest Chinese font library brand "Founder Font Library" to release the first Chinese font application reference book after the founding of New China— —"Chinese Typeface Application Manual I: Founder Typeface (1986-2017)".

Mr. Yang Linqing, who has long been devoted to the study of Chinese and Western fonts, is a well-known designer who has won the honor of "the most beautiful book in China" many times. This "Chinese Typeface Application Manual I" edited and designed by him from the user's point of view, reorganizes and analyzes the 422 fonts produced by Founder Type from 1986 to 2017 This typeface turns the complex types of fonts into an objective, clear, intuitive and easy-to-use system.

Next Friday(July 27th)Utopia, together with Lens and Pro Helvetia, specially invited Yang Linqing to share his insights and wisdom on fonts Knowledge, and his personal experience of the birth of the three books "Legend of Fonts: Helvetica Influencing the World", "Grid System in Graphic Design" "Chinese Typeface Application Manual I". （See the end of the article for registration details）

Today we will post a sharing by Yang Linqing at Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts Visual Communication Design Academic Week last month: I and Chinese fonts, and how he edited and designed this "Chinese font application" guide".

I and Chinese Fonts

Speaker: Yang Linqing

The excerpt is reproduced from the official account of the Department of Visual Communication of Chuanmei

The topic I share with you today is: Me and Chinese fonts. Chinese fonts are a big subject, why should I talk about content related to my mother tongue? Because this is also a topic that I personally return to in the design process, I hope to share with you such a case, it does not have any authority, it is just a personal growth experience of mine.

Why are we talking about Chinese fonts? Especially in recent years, fonts seem to be a trend, becoming more and more popular, and more and more people pay attention to them. As early as 2005, when I was in France, I didn’t know much about Chinese fonts before, because when we were in college, we mostly wrote artistic characters. At that time, computers were not very popular, and there were not so many fonts. Our focus is not on that place, but more on how to create ideas. Until I arrived in France, I talked about Western graphic design, Fonts are the soul of graphic design, I didn’t understand this word at the time.

If we put aside the design first, the text is actually a presentation of our own thinking, just like every place has its own dialect, which is formed based on living habits, culture, and various social factors. form. Why are Chinese characters in square characters and Western characters in Latin letters? Why do we think differently? He believes that Latin characters are composed of polyphonic structures, and a word must be composed of multiple abstract letters. The causal logical combination of interletter sounds and shapes has laid the thinking foundation for the development of modern science.

Chinese has a monosyllabic structure, and one word can express multiple meanings.Its spirit of refining and condensing beauty has a profound impact on Chinese culture. It is such an influence that subtly creates different Chinese and Western cultures. His research will immediately let me understand why Westerners regard fonts as the soul of design in design. Because one end is to connect our thinking, and the other end is to connect our communication.

So I refocused my perspective on the text, realized that I was so unfamiliar with my mother tongue, and then changed, and started to study the text. After I came back, I did a lot of application practice. The evolution of fonts has so much to do with technology and our thinking, but at the beginning of its creation, it was actually more related to our technology.

I started to consciously edit or participate in the publication of some books. After such an experience, I think it is necessary to share it with everyone. And I found that publishing is a very good sharing, so I then focused on publishing.

This book was read in the library when I was a graduate student studying abroad in France, and I began to understand an origin "text", which allows us to obtain and communicate information. Font is a form, but its inner reality is a presentation of our own culture and thinking, as well as the exchange of information.

I began to re-understand how Westerners build a very scientific logical system from words, how to build their methodology with words as the starting point. I found that text needs such a construction. I didn’t talk about what design is. I just said that when we treat text, first, have a sense of awe< /span>Secondly, how do I combine these things into a valuable information so as to present it well own culture.

These two pages talk about the history of the entire Western font, the first column on the left page is time, and the second column talks about the evolution of the entire western artistic trend strong>. The third column is about The Evolution of Media, that is to say, the impact on the whole world since Gutenberg’s invention of metal movable type printing in the fifteenth century. The fourth column lists the representative fonts produced in each era on the basis of the first three. On the right page is an anatomy of some representative fonts.

From the page on the left, you can see that the development of fonts and the evolution of our art genres, ideas, and technologies, from movable type printing to our smartphones today, have a very strict evolution process. Technology related. There are these fonts produced by their factors, and andthe generation of each font is not groundless, it followsthis social era, Culture, art, technology are closely related.

A book has a strong rule from the beginning of the word to the end. At the beginning of each font, there is a very clear purpose of use, especially the body font, which is a font for reading. To compose an article, it should give people a feeling of richer layers, and the eyes will be well guided when reading. In this case, the design is valid, otherwise your design will be authoritarian.

In 2016, I started to participate in the publication of the book "Grid System in Graphic Design". This book forms a systematic layout from the beginning to the end of the text, and even involves our space, that is, how to start from the words to form a more rigorous and scientific system, so as to apply this system to in different media.

What I talked about above is all in English, and it’s all related to Western languages. In 2012, because of work and my understanding of Western languages, I always wanted to make a Chinese book, because when we actually did the design, there was no such reference tool, so after cooperating with Founder at that time, I began to think about how to To organize such a reference book. From 2012 to this year, intermittently, after five years, this book was finally published last year.

My original intention is to be able to better organize my writing in terms of understanding of Western languages. First of all, it is based on the number of fonts increasing year by year. This is only the Founder family, not including the Hanyi font library and the Arphic font library in Hong Kong and Taiwan. You can see this growth rate alone. It is even said that the number of fonts produced in one year can be produced in previous years or even ten years. Until around 2009, due to the great convenience brought by the evolution of technology and the design of the Chinese font library, the number of Chinese fonts can grow well.

Font Legends poster

The following is a book from the Type Age, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published in 1992. When I turned to this book, I had a very strong feeling. When I was reading, my eyes could easily have a relationship with this font, and my eyes could fall on the words comfortably.

The reading experience reflected in the book itself makes me feel that I can easily absorb this content, and it is easy to read in such content, and there is a sense of accomplishment and a sense of pleasure. Nowadays, if we randomly flip through 10 books in a bookstore, almost half of them will give us a light-gray text and make us feel tired when reading, because these books use inappropriate fonts.

We all say that books and paper have a plot today, but we can’t make paper reading a better experience, we are too emotional in choosing words. The fonts printed in newspapers are very slender, and it is difficult to present a stable layout, so we are easily tired when reading, and cannot understand the inner content of the content, and cannot support you to better absorb the information through paper.

It is reasonable to say that we will do better today than before, but today computers are so convenient and convenient, and the paper reading we make is not as good as that time. The reason is the choice of words. Below I will take three fonts to talk about why the choice of fonts is so important and the scientific principles behind it.

Boya SongIn China, it is called the third generation of Baosong. Baosong is characterized by its literal comparison of square and flat, horizontal And the vertical stroke thickness is not very big. The reason is the newspaper itself, the characteristics of the newspaper's information on the medium, the printing method and the presentation method.

Song YiIt was used for dictionaries in the era of lead type, also known as Dictionary Song, as the name implies, it is a font designed for dictionaries. The medium of the font is a book, and the content attribute of the dictionary is large. Why is this font designed in such a way? The horizontal and vertical strokes are not very wide, the thickness is not too different, and the words are not very square.

"Book Song" is different from the previous two, it is designed for books. The characteristics of Shu Song are obvious, the horizontal and vertical thicknesses are relatively separated, and the outline of the characters is not as square as it is. Therefore, the gray scale of the overall text of Shuoshu Song will appear heavier than their two fonts, and it will allow us to better focus on each word on the book paper.

As early as the 1990s, when there were not so many fonts in our country, there was a very strict logical basis:What kind of fonts are used for what media, what kind of fonts are used for what content. Nowadays, although there are many fonts, the ideas must be very clear. Designing in this way can make the information clearer and more effective. So fonts are closely related to the properties of content, the way of layout, the medium of presentation, and the experience of reading.

The following book contains a total of 230 fonts. When I was making this book, I set a boundary, which is "70%". To be careful, this book is not talking about the principle of a font, but a kind of guidance in the application of this plan, which is equivalent to throwing bricks to attract jade, and my work can only achieve 70%.

Sorting out materials, establishing logical classifications, and presenting, but not giving a final answer. I wrote a sentence "We should not only follow the objective truth, but also be able to attract others, avoid subjectivity and extremes.It is neither the default state of the font nor the It should not be over-designed, the purpose is to help and guide all users to draw inferences from one instance and learn by analogy on this basis, and the remaining 30% is left to the users.

Speaking of this, my sharing is almost over. I worked on the book "Chinese Font Application Manual I" for five years, just like studying a graduate course. My purpose is more to become an assistant in design work through this sorting out. It is not absolutely authoritative. Although Founder Typeface is very authoritative, in fact, only 70% of this book has been done, and it is also a presentation of a stage in my entire learning and design process. thank you all!

Font is closely related to the attributes, layout, presentation medium and reading experience of the content. If you don’t know a font and apply it subjectively and casually, it will violate the original design intention of the font.

——Yang Linqing

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Yang Linqing Workshop

From Helvetica to

"Chinese Font Application Manual I"

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July 27th (Friday)

19:00-20:30

Lens>

(Chuang 1958 Park 4-12, No. 1 Guangqu East Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing)

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