

Where Simplified Chinese font type characters are used: There were also a bazillion Chinese immigrant communities and Chinatowns that had been established overseas before the new language was released they also kept the traditional characters. The thing is, Mao wasn’t the boss of Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Macau at the time, so they never made the switch, instead keeping the original, traditional Chinese typography. Wikipedia tells us: “The PRC issued its first round of official character simplifications in two documents, the first in 1956 and the second in 1964.” So he rounded up some linguists and they got busy. Long story short, after Chairman Mao and the Communists came into power in 1949, Mao decided that he could raise national literacy rates by decreasing the complexity of the language. Simplified Chinese Font Typesĭid you know there are two standard versions of written Chinese? Who doesn’t like looking at pretty things? Because Nothing’s That Easy: Traditional vs. Many of those languages, though they've evolved into something unique and distinct, still include Chinese characters today.

As far as anyone knows, Chinese is the world’s oldest in-use writing system, and most of the major East Asian written languages are kind of like GitHub forks of written Chinese. That might be you someday, no?įrom a learner’s perspective, Chinese typography is just flat-out cool.

Why You Should Careįrom a practical perspective, I’m getting an increasing number of calls from web and graphic designers who are being asked to produce Chinese-language versions of printed and digital materials. How many glyphs are there in a Chinese font type set? Does Chinese have “serifs” and “sans-serifs”? What is the Helvetica of the Chinese font world? We’ll answer all these questions and more as we cannonball into the deep end of East Asian and Chinese typography.
