Exploration and experiment of Chinese characters: design standards and rules

Article Description: the exploration and experiment of Chinese characters: design standards and rules.

Experimental text design Pioneer "032c". Image:helmut DC @ Flickr

Apple4us and Lawrence Li are important forces in the Chinese Internet to care about the use and design of Chinese characters (typography). They are committed to experimenting and improving the use and design details of the Chinese language, including the idea of adding spaces between Chinese and English (as we do), and using "and", in place of "and" (we are not fully using it for the time being). Today's "Chinese quotes and other" article details the Lawrence's views on Chinese quotes. More importantly, the article encourages you to conduct independent exploration and experimentation in the field of Chinese character design:

There is also a view that the use of punctuation should follow national standards. I would like to say that this standard is in the Chinese information is extremely underdeveloped, typography awareness of the era of the proposed, I do not agree. We should completely shake off the shackles of the standard and form our own standards through experimentation and discussion. All these issues should be discussed openly in the context of abandoning existing assumptions. I think it would be a pity to give up the possibility of experimentation simply because of the official standards of mainland China.

We are very much in agreement and appreciation of this point. Over the years, our perceptions of design standards have been changing. We have written all kinds of standards, rules, "common mistakes" and so on in the early days, and these things are fading away. This is because we believe that standards and rules are, of course, necessary (1. It can be used uniformly and conveniently for readers, 2. For beginners to be able to play a guiding role, but designers need in the following two cases to challenge the use of standards and standards:

1, whether the standard itself has been enough consideration and discussion.
2, the standard is applicable to the actual situation.

As Lawrence said, many of China's standards, in our view, are not strictly considered and discussed. This is true of many countries ' standards, either in the form of mixed political and historical factors, or without multiple scrutiny, rather than through aesthetic or practical scrutiny and discussion. This is large to China's strict requirements for horizontal and simplified characters, small to punctuation and paragraph of the first space can be clearly seen. For these standards, we should always be ready to question and overthrow. Questioning of national and traditional standards is not uncommon in the west. For example, Swiss designer Max Bill had objected to the German government's request for reform, writing all the articles in lowercase to protest, and an attempt by some of the U.S. media to put a comma outside the quotation mark, as opposed to traditional standards; The most recent one is the font designer Erik Spikermann It is proposed to distinguish the front and back quotes of the writing software IA Writer soft keyboard so as not to disturb the writing concentration.

Further, as the times have changed, even the standards that have been well thought out have become more discretionary in the new environment. The most typical example is the challenge to the original standard of a large number of mixed Chinese and English: How is the punctuation centered? Should I use a full or a half angle? What about the vertical platoon? Is there a more suitable punctuation mark to use (is "or" "more suitable for mixed row?) And so on, and the new question of screen typesetting: is the paragraph header still blank? How does the distance between paragraphs change? Even the noun translation may Qian zhong-shu than the national standard Qian Zhongshu to the western reader more friendly?

More importantly, the designer should always check "whether the standard applies to the actual situation". This is helpful to the development of the Chinese character design which is not perfect, or to have the traditional Western language design. For example, when encountering the Chinese and western mixed row, Robert Bringhurst's set of font size/row height table is completely meaningless; for photographic books, the Tschichold Gold Book grid (Golden section) may not apply; some traditional books, The use of traditional Chinese is better than simplified; some modern design, a large number of "/", "" and other symbols to replace national standards of punctuation may be more prominent visual sense of modernity, the design of the small details abound, but all determine the design is interesting or not.

In recent years, the western graphic design industry has challenged the traditional and modernist graphic design and text design rules and traditions, designers began to try to break through the taboo:

• No longer strictly follow the baseline (baseline) design text layout, to the intuitive adjustment of the eye.
• Discard the grid system for design.
• Arbitrarily squeeze, lengthen the font
• Large overlap of elements (overlapping)
• Traditional and not-eye elements used: Rainbow transition, Gomingdo color, comic Sans and so on.

In these traditional visions of contempt of vision and creative exploration, the possibility of design not only in art, advertising and other innovative design has been made significant progress, even for the public's serious design has been inspired, the entire social visual experience has been renovated and strengthened. From 032C Magazine, to Forms of Inquiry and other experimental design exhibitions, these are the concrete realization of these reflections.

For most designers, the legal standards that their work needs to comply with are not as strict as they think they are. If even large publishers can use non-standard punctuation (above), ordinary Web sites and magazines, manuals why to keep the dogma of Chinese class do not put it. For most people, what we want to see is visually interesting, form-minded design, consistent, old-fashioned design that is not pleasing to anyone except by revealing the laziness and lack of imagination of the designer.

In conclusion, neither the traditional content editors nor the designers in the frontier of visual exploration should be kept in the stay put of the traditional "standard" and "rule" bottom line. Ideally, we advocate the continuous strengthening of traditional learning (such as Western typography, Chinese traditional typesetting, the process of Chinese modernization, etc.), on the other hand, we should discard all existing rules, think positively and explore new possibilities.