Read a book, read a newspaper, text from the beginning of its unshakable position, filled with each of our daily life; However, in the complex text design, jump away from these designs, it is more important to see what the original text is like, cherish their every metamorphosis…
Song style of Chinese font
At the beginning of the creation of Chinese writing, like Egypt, it evolved from pictures and pictographs. But evolution is different. The evolution of Chinese characters has always maintained the original content of paintings or symbols, but when more characters are formed, various combinations are added on the basis of the original characters in order to form more characters, which is unique in the world cultural history. The development of Chinese characters, after the unification of China by Qin Shihuang, Chinese characters underwent a series of simplification and standardization. Before the advent of board printing, ancient books in order to spread the need to hand copy, because of the low cost of manual copying, easy to make mistakes, so board printing gradually became popular. In this way, for the convenience of engraving, gradually engraving workers invented a new font, its characteristics are: square, horizontal thin straight thick. There are small triangles around the bend. This font is more standard than regular script and has become a standard font, suitable for large-scale engraving. This is undoubtedly in order to facilitate the book from the regular script evolved a new font. As this font was widely used in woodblock printing books after the Song Dynasty, later generations called the font with this feature “Song Style”. Song style characters from the historical emergence, its characteristics have been fixed down, has been used until the modern, until the emergence of mechanized printing industry. In modern printing the distinction is more detailed, the horizontal thin vertical thick as the “old song Style”. Song style characters are square, horizontal and vertical strokes, horizontal and thin strokes, sharp edges and corners, rigorous structure, neat and even, with strong regularity of strokes, so that people have a comfortable and eye-catching feeling when reading. In modern printing, it is mainly used for the body of books or newspapers. Song style characters inherit the aesthetic charm of Chinese calligraphy, in the strokes, still maintain the essential characteristics of Chinese calligraphy. When compared with Tang Kai, we can see more clearly, such as the treatment of point, stroke, stroke and turning point, which is a highly artistic generalization of calligraphy brushwork.
In addition to the first one, which is the most conservative old Song Typeface, the other three are derived song typeface fonts. We can see that the chest line of the first two fonts is relatively large (the font is relatively open), which is obviously a relatively modern font. The latter two fonts have smaller chest lines and tend to be traditional fonts. Traditional song typeface, it can be seen that, on its reserve features of regular script, little red circle inside the scale of the triangle (small triangle decoration) is more rigid, is constituted with angular geometric, give a person the sense with rigorous but let a person feel too seriously restrained, so in the use of modern design, we prefer to use the other song typeface glyph. Compared with the traditional Song style, the scale of the long song style is not so sharp, faintly visible at the stop of the brush turning, look a lot of mellow. Long song style looks longer than normal song style, that is, the chest line is smaller; Its horizontal, vertical thickness close, point, skimming, na, pick, hook more tall and straight, integrated the characteristics of the Song and imitation song. Big standard song, it is characterized by obvious contrast between horizontal and vertical strokes, moderate in weight, not so hard, regular shape, eye-catching and powerful, often used in the title, cover and advertising design, with a modern sense (similar to the thick serif body, will be mentioned later). Imitation song style, the biggest characteristic is the width of horizontal and vertical “, the style is more inclined to handwriting, it is actually song Huizong’s thin gold font evolved, characterized by thin straight and straight, horizontal painting pen with hook, vertical stroke pen with point, such as dagger, such as cutting knife, vertical hook is long and thin; If song Style is a representative font with art deco, then the opposite is boldface. Boldface is characterized by the same width of horizontal and vertical lines, removing too many decorative details and making it more concise. Due to the development of the printing industry at that time, the text part was all song style, wanted to highlight the title part so as to develop boldface.
Black body itself is a kind of more modern font, so it’s literally and chest line is bigger, which is easy to read, according to different needs, design the relation of different thickness in bold font, the most basic is the first, slim bolded text gives light, delicate feeling, thick bolded text gives a person is heavy, thick, the feeling of power, These glyphs are designed according to different needs. Besides the basic styles of Song Style and bold style, there are many different types of Chinese glyphs, such as
PS: Serif will be mentioned later, because serif and sans serif are both terms that appeared in the development of Western fonts. In Chinese font, Song Typeface is serif. A black body is a sans serif body.
The presence or absence of serif fonts in English
The production process of the Western alphabet, through the evolution of Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, and finally in the Roman system, is widely used in the Western world and now popular in the whole world. With the advent of movable type printing, more and more designers tried to create beautiful, easy-to-read typefaces based on the original Roman script, and the alphabet now used in Europe, known as the Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabet in the world. English letters are generally divided into serif, sans serif, and other typefaces. Serif typeface means that there is extra decoration at the beginning and end of the strokes of the word, and the strokes are of different thickness. The sans-serif body, on the other hand, does not have these extra decorations, and the strokes are of similar thickness. The modern serif appeared at the end of the 18th century, emphasizing the sharp contrast between thick and thin strokes, accentuating vertical drawings while making the serif slender. Most modern serif bodies are less readable than older and transitional serif bodies.
- Serif can be divided into traditional and modern typefaces. Above are traditional serif (left) and modern serif (right).
The traditional serif, if you look at the thinnest part of the letter S, marked with a red diagonal dotted line, you can see that the thinner part of the letter is always tilted, that is to say, the thickness of the stroke changes, so it looks more traditional, it is a basic font. Modern serif body, stroke thickness has always taken care of the same state, relatively more rational, mechanical, standardized feeling. As for the support of the base (I will call it the support for the moment), the stroke connection of the traditional support is arc, while the modern one is flat geometry, which can also be understood as a kind of opposite presentation of sensibility and rationality.
- Sans-serif bodies can be roughly divided into three categories. The order of the figure above is classical sans-serif bodies, transitional sans-serif bodies and modern sans-serif bodies
Classical sans-serif font is the same as traditional song typeface, the most prominent feature is more decorative details, there is a bracket at the bottom (but because it is a sans-serif font, there will be no obvious arc on the stroke, the shape is more geometric, a little more powerful) transition sans-serif font is between classical and modern font. The biggest characteristic is both modern sense rational concise feeling also does not lose sensibility slightly brushwork, delicate and delicate feeling. You can see the red circle in the second part of the image above, its corner, the pause is the same thickness distribution. Modern sans-serif fonts are characterized by well-balanced strokes of thickness, a symbol of rationality.
In traditional text printing, serif lines are generally considered to provide better readability (compared to sans serif text), especially in large paragraphs where serif lines add visual reference to letters when reading. Sans serif is often used in headlines, short text paragraphs, or in popular texts. But with the change of modern life and fashion trends, people nowadays prefer to use sans serif because they look “cleaner”. Sans serif fonts are equally readable if the text is large enough. And because sans-serif fonts are often artistic, they are usually pleasant to look at on a monitor; And there are many more sans serif fonts than serif fonts, so you have a lot of choices.
In addition to sans serif, there are other fonts: some curly-looking, natural-looking baroque scripts, for example, and others that are distorted to suit the design style
From these basic glyphs we can find: in the process of development, characters are also constantly going through the process of eliminating complexity into simplicity. The establishment of Bauhaus school influenced the thinking mode of industrial product design, which separated people from the traditional culture of advocating nature and complicated craft in the process of design. Design is slowly budding, which is reflected in everything from industrial products to graphic art.
Here’s a look at how these glyphs are used in real life:
The English font in the picture above is a kind of modern serif, “hair serif”, which is characterized by fine lines. It looks very smooth, and the contrast between thick and thin lines is clear, clear and modern.
The title part of the figure above is a font of traditional sans-serif, which is similar to traditional industrial production. In order to meet the needs of the atmosphere at that time and highlight the theme, thick serif is selected, which is bold, powerful and classical.
Above the title is completely modern sans serif font, layout is a cross-sectional design, the typeface is used more slender without serif bold, visual center is also in the center, and to the left of the screen have echoed the details of the design, and smaller photograph echo of words cavity larger character, is easy to read, but some visual center is also relatively loose, People’s line of sight will be more open.
Compared with the above font, this book is designed with only text on it, so it needs to control the whole layout with text. Here, the most important information on the information level is chosen in a thick font with a large chest line, which attracts more attention by comparing the thickness of strokes. Two fonts of extreme thickness are put together to highlight and weaken what should be highlighted and weakened, but the space will not be full.
The curled script on the above invitation makes people feel very close, lively and cheerful.
Font, this is a piece of the sea of the papers written records of ancient China like the landscape, from right to left, until now still use in Japan, above this font is a bit like Chinese thin gold book font of song typeface, keep it stroke characteristics at the same time, and deal with it more tactful, kindness natural sense increase many.
This is actually a cover of Lee’s new book, because he talks about his growing up and how his personal experience or background influenced his brand design ideas, so it should be his brand packaging on the cover. In order to cater to the temperament of the overall design, the title title did not use the heavy sense of strength of the thick line black body to show, but chose moderate strength, looks slim moderate in black; There is also a contrast of thick and thin fonts interspersed; While attracting people’s attention, it also attaches great importance to the sense of rhythm of power. There is no sense of forced reading. The vertical design is very traditional.
Good ~ I am here just very shallow ground wordy so much, hope can give everybody a little enlightenment!