My MFA Thesis Research ::
Bilingual Type Primer for Chinese design students on Western Typography // 文字排印設計
Just submitted a proposal to AIGA Design Educators Conference in Hawaii. This year’s theme is Geographics: Design, Education and the Transnational Terrain. This is up my alley with my thesis project: a Chinese student studying + teaching in the US, developing an educational Western typographic primer for other Chinese students, from a broader, more global perspective and a connection to the rich printing and type history in China.
Wish me luck!
I have had the habit of using pocket size planner as a planner/mini-diary for over 10 years now. Sometimes they are blanked for 2 weeks if my day-to-day involves school/work/teaching, they get filled from edge to edge whenever I go home, which involves a lot of activity. I would jot down the shops and the many eateries I’ve been. For the past 2 years, I have been using MUJI’s kraft-cover planner (love it!). Since I have forgotten to pick one up when I was in NYC 3 weeks ago and unwilling to pay for shipping that cost as much as the planner, I have made myself a Moleskine planner (I remember my German design teacher correcting our pronunciation: it’s mol-a-skeen’-a, not mole-skin).
After a whole weekend of on-and-off freehand straight lines drawing {I’m feeling the pain of architecture students} and writing a lot of numbers , I have created myself a happy neon orange planner, along with different numbering typefaces for each month. I could only describe the whole process to be therapeutic, despite wanting to get to the end as soon as possible.
*I still have quite a few days of the week to fill in!
As I am researching for more content through reading history of printing in China, along with mixed feelings of excitement + anxiousness, I have been transported back in my high school era studying Chinese history. I have forgotten what amazing and rich heritage that Chinese possess and how intelligent my way-back-then ancestors had been. I could see the saying distance makes the heart fonder applicable not just to lovers, but to all things in general. History of my own country is more interesting when I am physically away from the culture. When I came across Macau, this tiny city that I was born and raised, being one of the places that mark the development of printing—the birth of 200,000 Chinese characters for the publication of a 6-volume Chinese dictionary more than 200 years ago, I feel like I am coming full circle with my roots when my MFA thesis topics happen to touch on printing. So eager to keep discovering more, despite the seemingly endless content that I could include in my project. Wish me luck and a focus, clear + selective mind in my reading!
Pen-and-ink Illustration of 19th-century Macau
Modern day Macau
Picture credits:
Macau Art Museum via wikipedia
Happy New Year everyone. 2012 is going to be a year of milestones for me personally!
This Christmas I repurposed my Austin Book project into Christmas postcards—Texas style. Hope my recipients enjoy these handmade cards!
Typography is what language looks like.
編排，是語言呈現的樣子。
— Ellen Lupton
譯: 洪雪娥
I would like for my interactive primer to take the format of an ipad app, which ideally would be tested as a running prototype prior to the final stage. Being able to export Indesign files as interactive PDFs and local html files is absolutely one of the routes I will go about prototyping, with prototyping here meaning flushing out an interactive document/app, in addition to mere wire-framing.
The problem arises: what if I want to create a brush function in the dummy app so users can play with different brushes?
From talking to different people about stimulating the brush effect, I realize that using Flash’s action script is a straight forward way to create usable brushes. So I thought I would refresh, or more accurately, really learn Flash for the first time just for the sake of prototyping. Who knew that a day after I make this decision Adobe announced a halt in flash development! Not really a big surprise, we have been seeing this coming, the only question was when. Considering I am learning Flash from the bottom up, now I wonder whether I should put in this effort to do so when Flash is going to be obsolete sooner or later.
App developers, do you have any suggestions on making a running app that is not necessarily itunes-store ready? What are go-about ways to app stimulation to that point that it communicates what it does without the hard-core coding?
Thoughts welcomed.
I found this article by Peter Bil’ak speaking to my project. We are so used to the terms roman and italic, that we rarely think of the origins of these terms: roman referring to the upright characters from the Italian Renaissance period, and italic referring to the cursive script by Italian scholars. Now wouldn’t it be funny if we were to call the upright character of Chinese characters roman, and the oblique characters italic? Or, does this emphasize the “root” of the vast typographic development from just the Western viewpoint?
Original article from Typotheque ::
“It is generally acknowledged that it was Gutenberg who invented movable type printing in 1436. It is generally forgotten that what is missing in that statement is the necessary qualifier “in Europe”. Thanks to the present-day dominance of Latin script we have largely forgotten that there are parallel histories outside of Europe, but the first recorded movable type system was more likely created in China around 1040 AD by Bi Sheng. His early type was made of wood, which was later abandoned in favour of baked clay, which produced smoother imprints. Unlike Latin script which uses 26 letters, Chinese script uses thousands of characters, making type composition particularly complicated. Nevertheless, movable type has been in continuous use in China since the 11th century.
Elsewhere too, printing progressed. Choe Yun-ui, a Korean civil minister, made the transition from wood to metal movable type around 1230 AD. Metal movable type was also invented independently of the Koreans in China during the Ming Dynasty. During the Mongol Empire movable type moved further west. According to legend, Laurens Janszoon Coster, a respected citizen of Haarlem, could have been the first European to invent movable type, if the account presented by Hadrianus Junius is true. But the story is not widely believed, which brings us back to Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, who invented movable type a decade later. In Europe.
Even today, typography as a discipline continues to be plagued by a Euro-centric bias. If any of the major typography reference books are to be believed, the development of typography has generally been limited to Western Europe. In Type & Typography (2002), the otherwise excellent book by Phil Baines and Andrew Haslam, the authors make a note that the history of writing and the alphabet goes back thousands of years, but they do not elaborate more on this. It goes without saying that their history of typography is only the history of Latin-based typography. Other books are even more blunt when it comes to the scope they cover. Classic volumes such as Updike’s obviously nationalistic Printing Type, first printed in 1922, or Harry Carter’s also already somewhat dated A View of Early Typography (1969) can be overlooked. But even recent books such Designing Type(2005) by Karen Cheng or A Typographic Workbook (2005) by Kate Clair & Cynthia Busic-Snyder don’t bother to mention that there is more to typography than Latin typography.
Most of the existing typographic classification systems also apply exclusively to Latin type. In catalogues of the traditional type foundries such as French Imprimerie Nationale, the house of Garamont, Didot and Romain du Roi, typefaces other than Latin are referred as “Orientales”. Most contemporary digital type foundries such as Monotype call these fonts “Non-Latin”. These terms certainly have rather colonial overtones, suggesting the idea of “the other”, describing foreign scripts in negative terms as “non-European”. In other disciplines, language and terminology have adjusted to the wider environment of the global village, reflecting the progress that the society has made in the last couple of decades, and we no longer find a boxed set of paints with the name “flesh” given to a light beige color. Only typography continues to display a shameless bias towards western civilization.
Some common type terminology is also inappropriate for typefaces which didn’t evolve in Western Europe. The term “Roman” is customarily used to describe serif typefaces of the early Italian Renaissance period. More recently, the term has also come to denote the upright style of typefaces, as opposed to the word “Italic”, which refers to cursive typefaces inspired by the handwriting of Italian humanists. Thus Linotype offers fonts called Sabon Greek Roman and Sabon Greek Italic, (designed by Jan Tchichold), based on 16th century models. But by using terminology which is typically associated with Latin type and evokes the history of Italian typography, Linotype makes a careless statement. “Greek Roman” and “Greek Italic” are contradictions in terms, mixing two very different histories. Such slanted versions of Greek or Cyrillic types should properly be described in more technical terms such as inclined, oblique, or cursive. Roman and Italic suggest that the Greek version has been Latinised, borrowing too much not only of the terminology but also of the formal characteristics of Latin type, ignoring the rich Greek traditions of typography.
The news is not all bad, however. Recent changes in technology such as the introduction of the Unicode system and OpenType font format have inspired type designers to consider the previously overlooked domain of “non-Latin” typography. It is estimated that in the last decade, more Greek fonts were created than in the entire preceding century. Books such as Language, Culture, Type (2002) have been published, promoting cultural pluralism, admitting that English and the Latin alphabet account for only one segment of global communications today. (According to 2006 Encarta statistics, the number of native English speakers is less than the number of native Hindi and Arabic speakers, and roughly one-third the number of native Chinese speakers.) Such books are very important because they also present models for alphabets less explored than the Latin one, and offer a comprehensive history of their use.
In his concise book, The Solid Form of Language (2004), Robert Bringhurst proposes a new classification system of world’s various written languages and scripts. This approach promotes a consciously inclusive approach to typography, and considers the whole history of humanity and its relationship to script and meaning.
The new possibilities are exciting for designers working with “non-Latin” type. There is a modest interest in Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, or Indic scripts, and even type design competitions have responded to the new situation by creating special categories. The new development is also good news even for designers working exclusively with Latin typography: while we might think that most of the possibilities of Latin type have been explored, traditions of typography from Greece, the Middle East, India and elsewhere can help us to rediscover how we understand Latin type today.”
tumblrbot asked: WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?
Ancient China.
In search for typography books that Chinese students use, professor Mariko Takagi mentioned to me the translated text of Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type. Its Chinese title 字的設計有道理 translates roughly as Making Sense with Type Design could be confusing to lead readers think this is a typeface design book. It is more of a typography textbook. Other than that, I am loving this book, from the paper used, layout, and its opening up of new Chinese vocabulary of Western typographical terms. I am interested in knowing what other authoritative typographic books are currently being used in China and Taiwan. Please do comment if you know.
The second book I purchased is a bilingual text An Illustrated History of Printing in Ancient China compiled by The Printing Museum of China. It will be great reference for the timeline of typographic development I plan to include in my East/West parallel timeline.
In type class, we learned about Gutenberg’s invention of movable lead type in the 1400s. Rarely mentioned is Bi Sheng’s (畢昇) invention of the very first movable type using clay in the Song Dynasty (1041–1048). Chinese ought to be proud about their ancestor’s contribution to the history of printing.
In August 2011, this typography project by a Korean student caught my attention. As an international student from Macau, I receive my design education in the States and have never thought about learning Western typography in a Chinese setting. Thinking about the proliferation of new designers from China and their education on Western typography, I feel that there is a need to fill for students with English-as-a-second language in learning English typography.
I have since taken on this project to find out what this need is, and creating an educational primer to bridge the Eastern + Western cultural gap on typography.
