Number of STROKE

In the English system, there is twenty-six letters, starting with A and ending with Z and form different words or vocabularies based on those twenty-six letters. This order is call “alphabetical order” which people usually write lists followed by the alphabetical order. But in traditional Chinese, characters formed based on radicals. In the traditional Chinese system, a character may contain between one to sixty-four strokes, it is a lot more than English characters.

Order of stroke in traditional Chinese

  Stroke order is an important rule when writing Asian languages for example traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Korean or Japanese, etc. Due to the fact that these languages are based on pictographs, however, in the English system, it is based on constructing words from an alphabet. For Asian languages, if writer does not follow the order, it can affect the character a lot.

  In traditional Chinese, there are about eleven strokes to form all traditional Chinese characters. The reason of taking an important role of the stroke order is because using an incorrect stroke order can cause the ink to fall differently on the paper.

 

History and background information of traditional Chinese

   Traditional Chinese is different with simplify Chinese, many foreigners are not sure about what is the difference between these two languages. Basically, both of them are originally Chinese, however, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau use Traditional Chinese, while Simplified Chinese is used in China, Malaysia, and Singapore. In Hong Kong, Traditional Chinese also represents Cantonese, traditional Chinese means the written words and Cantonese is the spoken language but they are the same. While, simplify Chinese means the written words for Mandarin, when they speak it calls Mandarin. But actually simplify Chinese was transformed from traditional Chinese it is because the China government led to a simplification of the writing system since 1956 because of the difficulties to read and write in most traditional characters, for example number of strokes. During this process, about 2,000 Chinese characters were made easier to read and write.
  In the Chinese writing system, there is no any limitation to the number of characters as it is open-ended one. The largest amount of characters of the Chinese dictionaries include around sixty thousand characters.

Introduction of my topic

  By continuing the research question from COP2, the research question in this essay is mainly focusing on the brands in Hong Kong and discussing how those brands create their logos in Traditional Chinese characters with their unique format and structure.

  Therefore, I divided my essay into few sections, each section talk about different things based on traditional Chinese characters. In the first section, it is all about the traditional Chinese characters, this time will be a lot more details compared with COP2 two as I didn't really talked a lot details in my COP2 due to the words limit and it wasn't the main factor in COP2. While, it is the most important factor in this research, hence, I planned to make this section as the main part of my essay. Basically, it is more information about the special structures in traditional Chinese and how it is different with English.

  In the second section, it is more research about the brands in HK that designing their logos in traditional Chinese based on those special structures or how they can break those rules, etc.

Cop3 proposal presentation preparation

  In order to present my idea better and clearer during the presentation, I divided my presentation into few different parts.

Research question: How do brands in Hong Kong create their logos with traditional Chinese characters using their special structure or format?

1, Setting my topic:
  As my Cop 2, my topic was about the structure of Chinese characters and the difference between Eastern and Western characters in design, hence, this is what I want to build on in this current research.

2, Purpose of setting this question:
-Hong Kong is my hometown
-After I graduate, I probably will go back to Hong Kong and work
-So most of my clients are Hong Kong brands which mainly designing with traditional Chinese characters.
-Therefore, I think this would be a really good chance for me to find and understand more rules of designing with traditional Chinese characters which is really helpful before I start working in the industry.

3, What have I done over summer?
- I read a few books about the typography of traditional Chinese and how to design or edit with it.
- For example, taking off some parts and rearrange it to form a new character or design.
- Also, I went back to Hong Kong for my summer holiday, moreover, I looked around different brands or even anything that has traditional Chinese characters so I took a lot of photographs that are really inspired me.

Books that I have read over summer

  These books are really interesting, even though I am originally a Hong Kong person and I know Cantonese (Traditional Chinese) well but I didn't even know we can edit the character in this way to create something new.

The most inspired photographs

  The first picture was the most attractive brand to me because the design is like 60-70s, the characters were not similar to what we usually write, it looks quite messy tho but it is still visible. This is what exactly I am interesting on.

4, What have I learnt? 

-Design something using traditional Chinese characters by their specific structure.
-In the past, I just mainly used English to design the brandings which were totally different structure with traditional Chinese characters.

  This is a really inspiring and interesting image from the internet, this is the style that breaking down the character into different parts.

5, What have I developed from the research?

-Understand more about how to design a logo with traditional Chinese characters, like how to edit with the typography and recreate the logo