After learning about typography in class, I was curious about how typography works for East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, which are character-based. I found this article that discusses some of the challenges that graphic designers faced when they want to use Chinese characters. For example, compared to English fonts, there are fewer font types to choose from because there are so many unique characters in the Chinese language, which makes designing Chinese fonts a lot more tedious. Most Chinese fonts also don’t have different weights like we discussed in class, because the font file size would just be too huge. However, the article does share a few examples of progress (from 2015 at least, I’m sure there are more now!) in Chinese fonts, which was great to see.
DSGN 264-401 | Fall 2020 