Written by: Chen Zhonghao Zou Yating
Posted on: December 20, 2018 | 
| 中文
Competition mark of 'Hanyi Font Star Competition'
“The font design looks powerful and simple.” “This one looks delicate, classic and well-balanced, especially its written style.” These days, the judging panel of the Third “Hanyi Font Star Competition,” held by the Chinese Font company Hanyi Fonts?finally carried out the appraisal of the participated works and selected 19 winners, out of more than 2,000 submitted designs, from both home and abroad. Participants of the competition were from different walks of life, including professional designers and fans of Chinese characters. “We hoped to provide a platform to discover more talented people for font designing, and to promote the innovation of font designing,” said the head of Hanyi Fonts.
During the evaluation, the judges found that many calligraphic character designs similar to “Jin Bang” style are given the names of “Cu Kai” (bold standard script), “Li Xin” (a kind of clerical script), and “Han Mo Cao Shu” (a kind of cursive script). There are even some modern font designs that are full of novelty, to mention a few: “Guai Guai Ti” (peculiar script), “An Ye Jing Ling Ti” (dark spirit script) and so on. These fonts will become available for use in everyone’s mobile devices or personal computers soon.
At present, it is estimated that about 2,000 Chinese fonts are used. With so many ready-made designs, why are we still expecting new ones to come? Specialists and calligraphers believe that new font designing is increasingly valuable, against the background of social and economic development. “As the times are changing, the forms of characters need to change,” said Min Wang, Dean of School of Design under Central Academy of Fine Arts of China. He also told the reporter, “Internet age enables people to choose fonts that fit what they need and like, and therefore, there will be greater room for individualized font designs than before.”
From the perspective of inherited traditional culture, the changes of Chinese character forms reflect changes of both the culture of Chinese characters and art of traditional Chinese calligraphy. “Song Ti” (a popular font of Song typeface) first came into being in the time of Ming Dynasty, when Chinese character engravers refined the imitation of Song-Dynasty-style typeface, which was initially shaped in the time of South-Song Dynasty. The prototype of the widely-favored, “Yan Kai” and “Shou Jin Ti” fonts, are based on the imitations of the valued calligraphies of great calligraphers such as Yan Zhenqing (a famous calligrapher of Tang Dynasty) and Emperor Huizong of Song Dynasty.
The relations between modern Chinese fonts and traditional Chinese calligraphy are of inheritance and innovation. According to Wang, Chinese calligraphy is basic to the font design of Chinese characters. However, with the non-stop innovation of printing technology and on-going popularization of digital media, modern font design should also take such factors into consideration.
Zhu Zhiwei, a font designer, designed “Beiwei Kaishu” (the font based on a regular script from Northern Wei Dynasty), and it won the bronze award in International Competition of Typography and Font Designing granted by Sensawa Company of Japan. In his eyes, original regular scripts look too graceful to be presented in an eye-catching way. So he applied “squared strokes” borrowed from the epigraph and stone carvings of Northern Wei Dynasty into regular scripts, changing its soft-cornered strokes into cutting ones, to show an even greater and more powerful form in character.
“The structure of the characters in bigger size should be tightly organized, while that of the smaller ones should be loosely but elegantly arranged,” said Zhu, while summarizing his experience of inventing fonts in 40 years. He pointed out that Chinese font designs, compared to individual calligraphy works of unique forms that tended to express personal emotion, ought to comply with the basic traditional handwriting principles, and at the same time should pursue the integration of their function and uniformity.
“The beauty of Chinese characters lies in the harmony between human and the nature. The nature enlightened us about the way we create characters. As the old saying goes, and we should ‘take from body nearly and from materials afar.’ In font designing, we should consider more about the nature rather than overdressing them.”
Osamu Torinoumi?????? ???), famous Japanese font designer, came to the competition and made his comments on these fonts, “Overall, China and Japan are keeping abreast with each other in the development of character design, and each side has its own unique features.” He pointed out that Japan outperforms China in terms of making Song Font and Bold Font more exquisite, while China is leading in the designing regular script and running script.
At present, learning Chinese language is being more and more welcomed in many countries and regions. Application and transmission of Chinese font is gaining speed. The bigger the font industry is growing, the wider the Chinese characters are spreading. “In the future, we should still focus on innovation of font, based on the traditional Chinese calligraphic culture, and form its own unique design style with our national characteristics and culture,” said Wang Min.
Translated by Yang Jing
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