Photo credit: Visual China
It is Disney itself that has more expectations for Shanghai Park than the Chinese tourists who started grabbing tickets three months in advance. In order to perfect as possible in the localization, let’s take a look at the details: if you observe, then find the difference between it and the Hong Kong Disneyland subtle — all the signs in the park with the Chinese translation, and Chinese label font is specially designed to keep the same style and English font.
Most of the Chinese fonts, specially designed for Disney, were designed by a small weifang company called “Character Making Workshop”. Ding Yi, the founder of The studio, created thousands of Chinese characters in hundreds of places, from signs in theme parks, restaurants and hotels to toilets.
Disney has been the font design company’s biggest client since 2012, when it has only about 10 people. As a font company founded only 7 years ago, to get such a million yuan order from Disney, ding Yi has become the envy of the industry model, but also quietly pushed an industry that people did not pay much attention to before the stage.
Font industry in China has been depressed for too long. For many years, people knew little about typefaces and had no copyright awareness. With the exception of state-owned enterprises capable of doing it, typography has been relegated to a hobby for a small group of designers, and the few who work in the industry make almost no money.
But in recent years, thanks to the rise of social media, a growing aesthetic awareness and an improving copyright environment, small font design companies like Typography Studios have come to the fore. Although the number of these companies is still “on your fingers”, the “sunset industry” is seeing renewed hope.
In Beijing’s Wudaokou office building, wenyue Technology, a font design company, received an angel investment in the first half of 2015. Its founder, Li Xiangchen, is also a newcomer to the industry. In 2010, when the post-90s generation was still studying, he designed a retro character called Kangxi Dictionary style. After attracting a lot of attention on the Internet, the typeface full of ancient style has gradually become a symbol of “small freshness” and “artistic style”. It has been used in various postcards, tea packaging and cosmetics packaging, including well-known brands such as Yunifang.
In 2013, the copyright of Kangxi dictionary body was bought by the sculptor of A fu essential oil with a large sum of money. This has become another inspirational story in the font design industry. After watching it for a few years, he finally decided last year to turn his hobby into a business, but he gave the company a name that sounded more in line with the Internet start-up wave.
Both Li xiangchen and Ding yi believe that the prosperity of the font industry has just begun.
The decline of typography in China
In fact, font industry in China also had a “golden age”. In the 1990s, there were dozens of large and small font manufacturers in China, including founder, Hanyi, Huawen, Huaguang, Zhongyi, Sitong and Great Wall, whose annual sales could reach billions of yuan. At that time, the main customers of typeface, major publishing houses and printing houses, directly to the font dealer for procurement.
But in the 21st century, the Internet came, and so did piracy. Font banks, after all, are a business model more dependent on the sale of legal copies than albums.
To design a Chinese font, you need at least 6,763 characters, and many can reach 10,000 or 20,000 characters. Every word needs to be carefully outlined and adjusted by the designer, which can take as little as half a year or as many as two or three years for a team of several people. Lengthy development processes and expensive development costs must depend on repeated mass sales of a font in order to make money.
The appearance of piracy has completely destroyed the profit model of font bank. For example, Hanyi originally had a font of 1,000 yuan, but due to the intrusion of piracy, it was later discounted to 50 yuan for sale, but its annual sales were only tens of thousands of yuan. Founder had and Xu Jinglei development of founder Jinglei font, each set of 10 yuan, legitimate software only sold more than 2,000 sets, and the market has hundreds of thousands of pirated sets.
As a result, the development of Chinese font industry came to a halt a decade ago. At that time, the number of font enterprises decreased to about 5, including Founder and Hanyi, and they did not make money all the year round. The largest font is actually subsidized by other businesses of Founder Electronics.
This left Chinese fonts in a serious shortage. When Ding yi was working as a graphic designer on a website, he found that Chinese fonts were often insufficient. Many designers try to design some of their own, but there is no way to make a complete library.
At the time, it was almost unknown to the average Chinese that there was a profession called typeface designer, and one could not even tell the subtle differences between black and song styles — just look at the ugly signs on the street.
“99.9 percent of people don’t know that fonts are designed one by one.” Huang Xuejun, deputy general manager of the business department of Founder’s electronic font library, lamented to jiemijian news reporters, “They think this thing is made by a machine, so when you throw it in the machine, the boldface and Song characters come out.”
How big is the gap between Chinese and foreign font design industry? Just look at the comparative numbers: There are millions of English fonts and only a few thousand Chinese fonts. If it is not fair to compare with The 26 characters in English, it has more than 3,000 Chinese characters compared to Japan, the second largest user of Chinese characters. There are only 600 species in Mainland China, 300 species in Taiwan and 100 species in Hong Kong.
This is directly linked to the profitability of font design as a business. In Japan, morizawa, the largest font company, has an annual revenue of more than 100 million YUAN, while Monotype Imaging, an American font company, has been listed on NASDAQ with an annual revenue of more than 100 million dollars. In Mainland China, font banks are struggling to survive because of thin margins.
Therefore, this industry in China is also faced with the dilemma of talent depletion for a long time, and the speed of product development can not keep up with the market demand. “Many school textbooks on font design have not been updated for years. Schools lack teachers who can teach typeface design, so it is impossible to teach high-level courses.” Huang Xuejun said.
There is one thing that makes Huang Xuejun sigh all the time. In an international font design exchange conference a few years ago, some Japanese designers were talking about the design of Chinese Mongolian and Tibetan. “In fact, Founder has been designing fonts for Mongolian and Tibetan for 20 or 30 years, but no one talks about it. It was very exciting for me.” Huang Xuejun said. The recession of the industry has made international academic exchanges lose their confidence.
Of course, in Japan, Europe and the United States, where font industry is prosperous, they all have a good copyright environment. Designers can earn money and the market is good to attract more practitioners, so that the whole industry can operate healthily.
Therefore, in China, the font design industry has almost become a rights protection industry in recent decades. Since 2007, Founder has been engaged in two long-running copyright lawsuits, one against Blizzard, a gaming company, and the other against Procter & Gamble.
Founder and blizzard’s lawsuit from the first trial to the second trial hit 5 years. Although the court eventually supported the founder, that blizzard infringement, but only judgment compensation 2 million yuan, and founder’s claim is far from.
Another lawsuit against P&G, launched in 2008, ended in 2011, but the court did not recognize the copyright of “Rejoice”, and ultimately ruled against Founder.
Due to the small size of font industry, there is no special legislation on typography and its characters in China like the United Kingdom and the United States, and the current copyright law also lacks a clear definition of works under the condition of emerging technologies such as Internet and software. This makes defending your rights through litigation a time-consuming and expensive business. The average small company and independent font designer doesn’t have the energy to Sue.
Social networking is turning things around
But with the rise of social networking, things are starting to turn around. The rise of Sina Weibo in 2010 not only created a large number of opinion leaders and Internet celebrities, but also brought light to independent font designers. In addition to a long and expensive legal battle, font designers have another way to defend their rights in this crowded public arena: tweeting.
In 2011, the film Love is Not Blind, which was released during singles’ Day and raked in 300 million yuan at the box office, attracted little attention. But in 2012, the film fell into a public opinion crisis. The then little-known character maker claimed on its official Weibo account that the film “Love is Not Blind” infringed on the use of its Yueyhei font and demanded the original price of 20,000 yuan per font per year. As soon as the news came out, a large number of netizens expressed their support for the studio, and a lot of media followed it up. Under the strong pressure of public opinion, the film company of Love is not Blind finally paid compensation to the calligraphy studio.
Another case that made The studio famous was against the popular variety show I am a Singer 3. On the second day of the show’s broadcast, the studio said on Its Weibo account that the program’s unlicensed use of its fonts was an infringement and would seek 150,000 yuan in copyright fees.
A high-profile campaign against high-profile cases has earned Ding’s workshop a lot of mainstream media attention, including People’s Daily, New Weekly and Caijing. The public is also beginning to understand the profession of typeface designer and realizing that it costs money to use typefaces.
Font designers seem to have found a whole new career path. With the development of social networks, designers no longer have to work in large design companies as before, but can carry out their own independent design. Through the Internet, they can launch products, promote products, contact customers, protect their rights and even interact with fans. Instead of being concentrated in first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai, a small company or studio with several employees can open anywhere with Internet access, such as third-tier cities like Weifang, Kunming and Changzhou.
Ding, who once worked as a website design director for Beijing Fashion Group, later returned to Weifang, where the cost of living and starting a business is lower. Xindi Font Studio was founded in 2010 by Wang Wei, a master’s degree student in English from the University of Hong Kong. After graduation, he chose to return to his hometown, Kunming, rather than stay in a big city. He originally set up an English training class, while designing fonts, but then completely quit the training class work, and opened a small studio with his wife, began to do font design full-time. Today, they have launched 11 different fonts.
That’s why most of the new font design companies we see today were founded after 2009. They can conduct full business discussions on Weibo, Zhihu and Douban, and also popularize font design knowledge to the public.
They can even explore “life-changing” opportunities through the Internet. Ding yi also got the Order from Disney “by accident”. When Disney’s Alice in Wonderland was released in China in 2010, Ding, out of professional sensitivity, realized that the Chinese font style of the posters in the Chinese version did not match the original English version, so he decided to redesign the version. “I probably designed it all afternoon and posted it on my blog.” “It was just fun, but it went viral on the Internet and Disney took notice,” ding said.
Although the film’s poster didn’t end up with a new design, Disney remembered the name of Ding Yi, a Chinese font designer. Two years later, Disney gave him a typography order for the Shanghai resort. And the order completely kept the company alive.
Even traditional font design companies like Founder are working more with folk artists and emerging cartoonists online to develop more playful and personalized fonts that appeal to young people.
In 2011, the story of choi Xianren, a disabled artist known as “Brother Chalk”, shocked the Internet. He wrote original chalk characters with his crippled hands. In 2013, Founder and Mr. Cui worked together to develop Founder Xianren Font, and Mr. Cui owns all of the royalties from the font for 50 years.
More creative fonts in collaboration with web cartoonists Ji Di, Yu Yanshu and Miao Wu surprise people who are used to the serious style fonts of Founder. “Scream” and “roar”, “four and a half”, and even “Cat in the Body” with a large wave of cat symbols, all make young people who love new things surprised to find that fonts can be so funny.
“It’s like a big store. We have luxury goods, supermarkets and small brand stores.” Huang Xuejun said. Today, more than half of founder’s new fonts released each year are personalized and creative.
The font design industry is still a blue ocean
In fact, theoretically speaking, all graphic designers should have the ability of font design, because font design is a basic discipline in graphic design. Also, typography is an easy art for designers to fall in love with. Different fonts often have different temperament, “boldface, Song Typeface is like a suit, orthodox and classic; Creative fonts like handwritten and cartoon are fast fashion like Uniqlo and ZARA.” Ding said.
And different black body actually also has different temperament, “Founder is trying to make black body become young, leisurely black series elegant, handsome black series tough and thin.” Huang Xuejun introduced, although the difference between different black body is only in a very subtle place.
Like the fashion cycle of clothing, font fashion is also in constant change cycle. Now the popularity of retro fonts, just to illustrate this point. “Nowadays, people will take inspiration from ancient books on inscriptions when designing characters. People have different needs in different times, and related designs will never stop.” Huang Xuejun said.
Although Chinese fonts are increasing at the rate of dozens every year, they are far from meeting the huge market demand. More and more occasions require design fonts to enhance their quality, brands want to use fonts to enhance their image in the eyes of consumers, and young people like to use more personalized fonts on their mobile phones.
In the past, the major customers of font merchants were mainly traditional media such as publishing houses, magazines and TV stations, while now the trend is that there are more and more enterprise customers and even start-up companies. For example, more than 2,000 enterprises have purchased the license of character library from Founder.
With the development of screen technology, fonts can be presented in perfect detail on the screen. Reading habits change from PC to mobile terminal, which also puts forward more requirements for font design. Butter Camera, a picture APP launched in December 2014, is a typical example. Fonts are the selling point. Different from other picture tools, butter Camera allows users to add text of various fonts on pictures to create pictures with a sense of design.
The app has purchased more than 100 authentic fonts so far, and some are paid for to help users get used to them, according to The app’s founder. But there are still not enough fonts to choose from, such as the lack of fonts on the market designed specifically for graphic typography. As a startup, Butter Camera didn’t have the ability to customize fonts like Disney did. So he decided to get involved in font design and hired a font designer to develop it himself for a year.
“There are so many fonts to develop, every font design company is positioned differently, and the market is huge, so I’m not too worried about competition.” Ding said.
While typeface designers say the industry is getting better, it’s still hard to make money out of it. Even the industry’s star company, The Calligraphy studio, is not doing well. Ding said that although the company makes millions of dollars in sales each year, the ordinary font library business is not profitable and needs to be subsidized by other font customization businesses such as Disney and the golden Age, which charge relatively high fees.
At present, the authorization mode of character library will basically separate individual non-commercial and commercial use. The authorization price of commercial use ranges from several thousand to tens of thousands per type per year, while the packaged permanent authorization price will be more favorable. Non-commercial licenses for individuals cost less and are essentially free to use or a token “tip” of 1 to 2 yuan on Taobao.
According to Ding yi, the cost of developing a font in the workshop is hundreds of thousands, and some complex ones even cost millions. If the infringement problem cannot be solved fundamentally, it will still be a big challenge to develop the industry. Not only large companies, small and medium-sized enterprises in the market, individuals, everyone needs to establish a knowledge of font copyright.
In addition to copyright issues, talent is another big challenge for the industry. Over the past decade, Founder has held font design competition every two years, and this year is the eighth one. This time, they even put the award ceremony and exhibition at the National Center for the Performing Arts, in order to increase academic exchanges in the industry, attract more young designers who are passionate about fonts, and try to explore some possibilities of commercial cooperation.
Becoming a typeface designer still depends on love and emotion. For example, Li Xiangchen was not a design major, but accidentally developed an interest in font design during her study. According to Li revealed to the morning, his investors are willing to pay the same more out of feelings.
Ding Yi, for example, he was obsessed with design blackboard newspaper writing calligraphy since childhood, from middle school after dropping out of handwriting calligraphy signs began to later in the Banyan Tree, Sohu and other websites to do graphic design, and then served as the fashion group website design director, almost 20 years never left the font.
“Deep down, I’ve always been grateful for Chinese characters. Without font design, I might still be growing vegetables in my rural hometown.” In a high-rise office in Weifang Wanda Plaza, Ding Yi, who was born in a farming family, laments the changes font has brought to his life.
(At the request of the interviewees, it should be noted that the “Founder” mentioned in the article refers to the “Founder Electronics” owned by Founder Group.)