Founder Fonts Chief font designer Zhu Zhiwei: from a stroke

Zhu Zhiwei is a Chinese font designer and is now the font development director of Peking University founder Electronics Co., Ltd. His works include the North Wei script, the iron-ribbed script and the Boya song in founder's library. Speaking of his own design experience, Zhu said he has worked in the field of font for 44 years, and has witnessed the three times of typography, from lead and fire to light and electricity, to today's internet age.

When we talk about font design, we often talk about the question of how font and font applications will change in times of change. Founder Font Designer gave the answer:

No matter in what age, the development of the font and the fundamental purpose of the change, are to meet the people's visual feelings, adapt to human visual function.

Zhu told us that the factors affecting font development can be summed up to four points: culture, technology, vision and fashion. One of the most direct drivers of font development is the development of culture. When the cultural prosperity, information enhancement, so that the social demand for words in the increase, it will stimulate the development of the font.

Taking the Song Dynasty as an example, font was not welcomed by Chinese literati in ancient times, until the Qing Dynasty. Rich Chinese literati, they have to use soft words, that is, the previous song version, is in italics. However, the straight strokes of the song body is easy to operate, and low cost, thus becoming unstoppable in development. Look back to the Song Dynasty, you can find that it is always along the clear, convenient, fast direction of development. These are conducive to the spread of factors, and this is the overall trend of font development.

But more importantly, the development of the word, is according to the human visual law to develop.

For example, the human eye produces a visual illusion, for example, the human eye always pay attention to the left side of the object, and then pay attention to the right, first notice above and below, which leads to the same width of the object, the left side will be more than the right side of the wider, horizontal, this slope vertical, but the actual they are the same. In addition, from the visual habits, vertical objects will appear active, changeable, horizontal objects will be stable. In the design time, the song body adopts the treatment and design of transverse fine vertical coarse, and adjusts the dynamic and static.

In bold, that is, the so-called "no" flow into China time is not long, the early is used in the body to highlight the emphasis on the role or title. But as a result of technology, bold text becomes today's mainstream font. Founder for Microsoft developed a screen display font, that is, Microsoft ya Black, at the same time, we also developed for the mobile phone screen for the second generation of display fonts, called leisurely black. Both of these fonts are developed according to human visual needs.

Today's digital technology, we can make the word more exquisite, very smooth, so that people do not see the manual and Machine traces. Now we have a lot of font enthusiasts, in the book from ancient books to find creative ideas. The trend of edition is to copy down the ancient excellent style, which is impossible in the age of machine carving, but now computer technology provides this possibility. Even in the digital age, Zhu insisted that the design of the font must have a deeper pursuit, is the relationship between the font and vision. Two points are important: readability and legibility.

Readability is the degree to which the font is recognizable, and legibility is the comfort of reading information that helps you understand the function of information.

This can be specifically divided into a few points to say:

In the word array, a single word is a whole, a word is a whole, the formation of text block, there will be a relatively neat, uniform reading rhythm. This is the sense of wholeness, which provides a more convenient reading effect for human visual function. Therefore, the left margin is large, the right word distance is small, the word distance is more conducive to reading text.

The Chinese traditional design is called the waist is tight, the depth is high. In the design of Boya song, the upper nine Sudoku as large, the following is the middle of the big around small. The following nine Sudoku will stretch over the top, which is structurally different.

Font structure and size, can affect the color of the font, the font is colored, dark gray or light gray, of course, darker color, more conducive to reading.

In the past decade, typography has faced designers of graphic media, and now a new era of technology has begun. In the new era of technology, the font came to the reader to go through two links: one is the font designer to design good, and then a product manager, UI designers to use the word good. We look forward to working together to bring more love to readers through font.