Project statment

Project statement

The topic of my essay is about how brands in Hong Kong create their logos with traditional Chinese characters by its specific structures the can be edited to form a new design. Therefore, I was thinking if I could make something based on the research that I have collected and use it to my practical outcome, it would be meaningful.As my essay is about how brands edit traditional Chinese characters and use it into their logo, hence, my practical work is a typographic guide to be used by designers when branding for a Hong Kong market. I think it is a great opportunity for me to get more knowledge about how to use traditional Chinese characters to create a brand in Hong Kong as I am originally from Hong Kong. After did those research, I was quite surprise, even though Cantonese is my first language but I didn’t know there are many complicated structures until I did the research. Hence, in the practical project, it is a really good platform to practice on it so that I can get more experience for my future when I work in Hong Kong. I found that symmetry, editing stroke weight and cursive writing style are the best categories for designers to create their brands in Hong Kong using traditional Chinese characters. Due to the fact that they give a strong, powerful and creative image to consumers, hence, I can apply these categories when I work with traditional Chinese characters in Hong Kong. Symmetry makes characters become more legible because it makes the character more like pictogram. Adjusting stroke weights can create a strong contrast to viewers. The cursive writing style provide the tradition beauty to the characters. Normally, I didn’t really have a chance to design with traditional Chinese characters as I usually just designed with English so this was a great chance for me to practice on designing with traditional Chinese characters. I found that we need to manipulated the characters according to how they look like, for example, if the character has too many strokes, it would be better to manipulate with geometric shapes so that the character won’t look too complex.

I think I did a good time planning to write the essay as it is quite difficult for me to write 5000 words due to the fact of the language barrier so I started it quite early in order to finish it on time. In the practical project, I tried with different categories on some traditional Chinese characters and I found that symmetry, editing stroke weight and cursive writing style are the best for designers creating their brands in Hong Kong because they look really effective. Overall the project, I think I can try to choose some famous UK brands and rebrand their logo into Hong Kong market with traditional Chinese characters next time so that I can have more chance to try working with traditional Chinese characters in Hong Kong market. Moreover, grammar and tenses are the most difficult part on my essay because in traditional Chinese we don’t really have grammar and tenses so it is completely different, what I can do is to practice more on writing in order to prevent the same mistake occur again and it would be a great chance to improve my English as well.

Evaluation of practical project

In the practical project, I tried with different categories on some traditional Chinese 

characters and I found that symmetry, editing stroke weight and cursive writing style are the best for designers creating their brands in Hong Kong because they look really 

effective.

Symmetry makes characters become more legible because it makes the character more like pictogram. Adjusting stroke weights can create a strong contrast to viewers. The cursive writing style provide the tradition beauty to the characters.

Overall the project, I think I can try to choose some famous UK brands and rebrand their logo into Hong Kong market with traditional Chinese characters next time so that I can have more chance to try working with traditional Chinese characters in Hong Kong 

market.

Final Design

The final design looks quite well, I like the simple idea of the typographic guide design. The front and cover I worked with green because it looks friendly and it match with the white colour fonts. The ring-binding guide look professional, while because of the single pages, the output seems a bit too thick.

Binding and materials consideration

In order to produce a good typographic guide, I was planning to do a metal ring-binding guide book vertically as it is easier for readers to flip the pages. Also, I was decided to print it in double side because it can save more paper. However, as I worked some pages in black&white and colour, they can't be printed in both colour mode at the same time and if I printed it all in colour mode, it would costs a lot of money. Therefore, the easiest way to solve this is to print it in single side so that some pages can be printed in black and white so that I can save more money. The only disadvantage of doing that is need to use quite a lot of paper.

Idea development

Since I changed my idea to produce a typographic guide, I started to collect examples as many as I can to get inspiration on how to edit the characters. First of all, I know that traditional Chinese characters also named as "Hanja" and "Kanji", which also using in Korea and Japan. However,  most of the young people don't use in their daily life especially Korean, also, there may have tiny difference on the characters. Hence, I was thinking I can compare the differences and then create a new design from that. Therefore, I asked some of my Japanese and Korean friends to help me to write some selected traditional Chinese characters and I can use the differences and form the design and then I sketched some quick ideas.

Since I got those basic ideas, I started to development them by those possible categories digitally, the outcomes are exactly what I wanted. For example, using English letters, geometric shapes, cursive strokes and hand writing, etc. At last, I selected five traditional Chinese characters randomly including "香", "港", "設", "計", "商" and then did some examples on how these categories can work on different characters in order to produce a typographic guide book.

Initial ideas

I was planning to do a branding rebrand for my practical project, choose an UK company and rebrand their logo for the Hong Kong market. While, I think this idea is a bit straightforward and it is too similar to the project project that I did in Cop2. Moreover, I think it is not challenging and I can only lear few things from it. 
Hence, I changed my idea to make something creative, and use my specific area (The knowledge of traditional Chinese) to my design. As a result, I changed my idea to make a typographic guide to be used by designers when branding for a Hong Kong market. It is a really interesting project, I can learn a lot of things from it, for example, I can get more experience on how to editing the traditional Chinese characters by those categories, it would be a great chance for me to prepare my future works in Hong Kong.

Practical project research

There are may categories that work well with traditional Chinese characters, the best ways to manipulate with traditional Chinese characters are symmetry, editing stroke weight and cursive writing style are the best categories for designers to create their brands in Hong Kong using traditional Chinese characters.

A lot of examples did by different designers in Hong Kong manipulated with those categories, I found some examples that are really inspiring. They tried to break the tradition rules of traditional Chinese characters to produce an unique design in brands or art works.

The original character on this design is "香港" which means Hong Kong, this design tried with bold stroke and it creates a strong and powerful feeling to viewers. 

In this design, they tried to change the stroke writing directing so that it looks more contemporary. 

Some characters can be transformed into pictogram in order to represent their meaning in other ways.

Taking the sound of letter "e", as it is same as the sound of "依" in traditional Chinese character, normally, people say "依家" which means "now". Due to the fact that "e" and "依" has the same sound so the designer tried to put "e" and "家" together.

This diagram showed how a traditional Chinese character can represent in pictogram.

In this design, the designer adjusted stroke weight on each part of the characters, hence, it has different stroke weights on each character.

The designer tried with symmetry, it looks slightly different to the original characters "相辯性理論" but it can still be readable.

It used geometric shapes (rectangle and square) to build these characters "井蓋展". 

It used rounded strokes to make this design.

It used the cursive strokes to create this design, the original character is "食".

This design tried with kerning, to join both characters together by its horizontal strokes.

It built by different geometric shapes (square, triangle, parallelogram, etc).

Practical project rational

In this practical project, the outcome is a typographic guide to be used by designers when branding for a Hong Kong market, including different categories that working on some

traditional Chinese characters. The aim of doing this is to show some examples of how those categories work in a physical outcome and give some suggestions to designers how they can manipulate with those categories on traditional Chinese characters.

What usually people try to edit the characters with those categories

Based on a original character, designers tried different ways to break the tradition rules in order to make something that is creative, unique, contemporary. Hence, there are some common ideas that people usually try to edit the characters with those categories.

1)symmetry
-There are quite a lot of words having symmetric characters in traditional Chinese characters.
-Hence, it is a good way to make the characters into mirrored symmetric character as it looks really amazing, attractive and artistic.
-Symmetry makes characters become more legible because it makes the character more like pictogram, however, it can only be done in some characters that are symmetrical.
-Most common way of symmetry is reflection.

2)Adjusting stroke weight

-Adjusting different levels of stroke weight can create a strong contrast to viewers 

-Also, alter the thickness of a character will still keep the shape but does not change the character a lot. 

-As a result, it makes the character look more dynamic and active to customers.

3)Using geometric shapes or make simplification of characters -Since traditional characters are really similar to the geometric shapes especially rectangle and triangle, designers usually use these shapes to replace the strokes of the characters rather than keeping the complex strokes. -By reduced the complicated strokes, it can produce a simpler character on the logo.

4)Calligraphy/cursive writing style/Classical Chinese

-The traditional Chinese calligraphy is one of the culture of Hong Kong so some brands used it into their logo.

-The traditional Chinese calligraphy provided the tradition beauty to the logo if it used on a brand.

-So it looks more attractive to customers

-Classical Chinese is the ancient writing format of Chinese characters, it looks more like pictograms so it increased the legibility of the logo.

5)Using with English

-As some brands want to use both languages in their logo to make it more like an international brand, they put English under the traditional Chinese characters.

-So designers have to consider which typeface should they use to make both languages match.

-One of the most common pair is “Kozuka Mincho” working with “Didot Bold” where both typefaces are quite modern style and have strong contrast. 

Categories that can try to work with traditional Chinese characters

There are several ways to editing traditional Chinese characters from the original characters based on its specific structures, by editing the characters to form some unique, creative and modern characters to fits the market in Hong Kong.

1)Reduce the strokes of traditional Chinese characters
-As most of the original traditional characters are quite difficult to write or look complex. Hence, people tried to reduce the number of strokes by replacing some strokes with geometric shapes having similar shapes.Also, reducing the numbers of strokes made characters look simpler. It is different to English or other latin languages characters, as most strokes in traditional Chinese are straight line so it is easier to use some geometric shapes such as triangle, rectangle or square, etc to replace the strokes.

2)Change the writing order of strokes/writing direction

-As traditional Chinese characters are formed by different strokes, people tried to use other things to replace the strokes. Changing the strokes can make the character look more contemporary. The characters became more flat and not rounded comparing to the standard writing which look more friendly.

3)Classical Chinese characters/calligraphy -Because of the tradition beauty of the calligraphy, it makes the character looks more familiar and more legible. It looks more like a pictogram rather than a word.

4)Breaking down the characters into different sections/parts

-Due to the fact that traditional Chinese characters are formed by different radicals or strokes, therefore, some designers tried to separate the character into different radicals or strokes in order to make it unique. 

-However, it may looks messy once mixed the character into different parts so this categories may only suitable for brands that think the characters on their brands don't need to be readable.

5)Multi languages on the same design -A common combination is joining English and traditional Chinese characters as it showed the inter-connection on both languages, one from east and one from west. -So people usually join a stroke from English and a stroke from traditional Chinese character and then form a word either in English or traditional Chinese.

A CROSSING LANGUAGES

Normally, in the English system, it just contains alphabets and sometimes with numbers. Also, in the English system, there is limitation to limit how people write, it means for example, when people write the date, they can only either write the year “2018” or “two thousand and eighteen” but not “two thousand and 18”.

In traditional Chinese system, it is totally different, it is allowed that people can write in different format, using "2018" as the example again, the original writing of 2018 in traditional official writing characters should be “二零一八 ”. However, the character "零" has too  many strokes in the character “零” so people started to write “ 〇 ” to replace the previous one, it is just a wider version of “0” so that it looks parallel with other characters. The sound of “〇” is same as “零”, therefore, people won't get confuse even though used a different word.

SYMBOL AND SPACING

In English and traditional Chinese, punctuations are almost the same, both languages have comma, exclamation mark or question mark, etc. But there are different ways to write these punctuations. Basically, in English, these punctuations are written close to the baseline which means these punctuations are written next to the bottom of the word. While, in Chinese system, a punctuation takes the space of one full character and put in the middle of the line. Moreover, the full stop in traditional Chinese looks different with the one in English, it is a small circle rather than a black dot.

X-height

In the English system, the upper half of the x-height and the ascenders of the characters are more important and differentiated than from the lower half of the x-height and the descenders. For example, the lower part of the characters on the lower case of a, g, p and q are more differentiated. When the upper half of x-height are covered, it is really difficult to see the text. However, if the lower half is covered, it is still able to read the text.

In the traditional Chinese system, the roles of the upper and lower half are equally important because the characters were formed by different radicals and it can be mixed around and form a new or different character. Therefore, if half or any part of the character is covered, it may becomes another character and people may get confusion by that. Hence in traditional Chinese system, both the upper and lower half are important.