Figure 1-The evolution of Ming Romantic.
Typography is considered a powerful medium to promote cultural diversity and maintain national culture even in contemporary times. Typography emerged in China with the development of printing entFering into the Song Dynasty (Fu & Wang, 2023). The carving process influenced the stylish evolution of Chinese characters that eventually gave rise to the Song face type. Typefaces are considered instrumental in designing work to equalize the style of speech with texts and help give a project a recognizable voice immediately. Chinese typefaces are considered more complex than Western typefaces as a modern Chinese typeface needs to use Roman characters along with 2500 to 3000 commonly used Chinese characters to be used (Nate, n.d.). Originating from the Song and Ming dynasties, it is a modern interpretation of a type of printing known as Ming Romantic. (Figure 1) However, since 1040 AD it was difficult to develop the Chinese printing press and typefaces as there was a limitation to the high costs of production (Nate, n.d.). Even though the modern Chinese typefaces have increased with the allotment of funding they are complex and require a team of designers to make a Chinese typeface useable.
The Chinese language follows the Hanzi script where Han means the dynasty and represents the largest ethnic group in East Asia (Tam, 2018). Strokes are considered to be the elementary building block of Chinese characters (Tam, 2018). A Chinese word is believed to be formed of one to three characters while the spatial separation between the words varies in context. Mandarin and Cantonese were the two widely spoken dialects during the 1932 rule of the Republic of China (Tam, 2018). During this era, simplified Chinese characters were used as the official script in Mainland China and in many other parts. Until the adoption of the Western horizontal style of typesetting by the government of the People’s Republic of China, traditionally Chinese text was written vertically from top to bottom. During the Tang Dynasty, a standardized lettering style developed first in woodblock printing and later in typefaces used for moveable printing, called Kaishu (Tam, 2018). In the wide range of Chinese scripts, Kaishu is considered the last development. To speed up the production, a new style emerged called Songti. This style gained maturation during the Ming Dynasty and signalled a typographic rather than calligraphic aesthetic to print.