The characters are narrower at the top and wider at the bottom, resembling the gestures of Chinese handwriting that have been second-nature for centuries. Its proportions follow more of a gently sloping triangle, a change that is slight but significant in changing the overall texture. First, it breaks free from the square box that had been imposed on Hanzi for decades. Ku Mincho differentiates itself from existing Ming typefaces in design, structure, and proportion. But when looking back at ancient Chinese calligraphy sources and early movable type, there was a distinct heartbeat and spirit that has been forgotten over time. If Japanese kanjis were designed to be stones that ground and guide a flowing stream of kanas, when they are used in Chinese text they feel stiff and rigid-blocking instead of guiding natural currents of the eye. An example of the relationships between typeset Japanese Kanji and Kana. The Chinese typefaces that developed thereafter have been largely dictated by Japanese tastes, and strayed further away from their visual ancestry. By the mid-20th century, Japanese foundries occupied most of the phototypesetting businesses in these regions. After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China were primarily importing and printing with these Japanese metal types. Image courtesy Julius Hui.Īround the mid-19th century, when Chinese movable types were first exported to Japan, the Japanese kanji were changed to fit almost perfectly inside a square box, to serve as sturdy anchor points to complement the more free-spirited hiragana and katakana scripts.

This habit formed overtime as an outcome of cultural imports and exports, but continues to pose practical problems as well as aesthetic ones.

Instead, many designers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China will often use the Hanzi from Japanese typefaces in their work, since Japan’s font culture and aesthetics are considered the most refined and have had the most time to mature within East Asia. He remembers asking people how they feel about Chinese typefaces, to which many replied, they don’t. But what exactly has been lost?Įver since Hui was a student at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in the late 2000s, he’s seen how the mood of a layout could be killed with setting Chinese typefaces. Ku Mincho sets out to be a typeface that revives the innate beauty of Chinese characters. Yet behind this feat was a long, uneasy road. To date, he’s raised more than five times that amount-indicating both an excitement and a clear need for the typeface. The initial goal of four million NTD (a little under $150,000) was reached in only a few hours. At the beginning of 2021, type designer and typographer Julius Hui launched a crowdfunding campaign for Ku Mincho, a Ming-style typeface he began concepting six years ago.

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