More and More People Talk About Type. How Many Have Traced Its Connections to Social Reality?

A group called Type is Beautiful is trying to dig up those threads.

Zheng Chuyang, a type designer, once described a quick way to tell three kinds of restaurant apart: Xinjiang Uyghur places, Hui halal places, and the ones opened by Arab traders in cities like Guangzhou and Yiwu. The clue is the Arabic lettering on the sign. Xinjiang restaurants use a squared-off, upright face that comes from a printing type fixed in 1982; Hui halal restaurants mostly use a springy handwritten style; Arab restaurants use the modern Arabic type common across the Middle East.

That comes at the end of an article Zheng Chuyang wrote for the Type is Beautiful website.

Type is Beautiful (TIB for short) was founded in 2007. Its first article picked apart the difference between Helvetica and Arial — whether the second really was "a shameless, cut-price substitute with nothing to recommend it." The author was Rex, who also edits the site.

TIB's core team is six people. One works full time on operations; the rest all have day jobs, and they live in different time zones. Its contributors are scattered too, across cities in the UK, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and the mainland.

"Loose" and "interest group" are the words they use for this publishing project, but you rarely find here the collage-style "appreciation" posts about newly released typefaces. Mira is TIB's full-time editor. "As type design became a craze and people started paying attention to graphic design, you can find that sort of coverage on any number of self-media accounts, in the mass media, or on Pinterest," she told QDaily. "We don't need to repost it. What TIB wants is to climb out of the box of pure visual aesthetics."

How do you introduce a typeface? Many people have heard the Helvetica story: a type designer in New York tried to spend one day without it. He avoided clothes whose logos used it, gave up the subway, took the new-series dollar bills out of his wallet and deleted Helvetica from his computer — only to find that the internet was the bigger disaster area.

The story appears in a book called Just My Type: A Book about Fonts, which made the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list in 2011. The designer Michael Bierut praised its author as "the cultural ambassador our field has long been waiting for," someone who broke through the professional barriers and brought type into public view. Before it, what you found on the shelves were formulaic chronicles of typefaces.

The book opens like this: "In Budapest, surgeons operated on György Szabó, a seventeen-year-old printer's apprentice, because after a failed love affair he had cast the name of the woman he loved in lead type and swallowed it." It also passes on the gossip about the designer of Gill Sans, whose other side was an endless run of sexual experiments conducted with no regard for ethics.

Two years later, two TIB contributors, Wu Tao and Liu Qing, translated the book into Chinese as 《字体故事：西文字体的美丽传奇》 (The Story of Type: The Beautiful Legend of Western Typefaces). The same year another TIB member, Li Zhiqian, published 《西文字体的故事》 (The Story of Western Type). Explaining classic Western typefaces and the history they came out of became one of TIB's regular storylines.

Rex once wrote about Gotham, the typeface behind the word "Change" in former US President Obama's campaign. Its designer, Tobias Frere-Jones, walked postwar Manhattan photographing hundreds of derelict shopfront signs, truck lettering, advertisements and building plaques from the 1930s and 40s. This lettering, drawn by hand by ordinary Americans of the time, was taken to stand for New York's "frankness, sincerity, toughness and character." That visual identity is credited with helping Obama's campaign.

In extraordinary times, an extraordinary typeface can open certain doors. Mira has written about Willem Sandberg, director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, who during the Second World War used what he knew about lettering and layout to forge identity papers for Jews in the museum basement.

Li Zhiqian works with Zheng Chuyang; together with a German designer they set up a studio called 3Type.

On the "type craze" everyone is talking about, Li Zhiqian says that heiti — the plain, sans-serif Chinese style once tied to leaders' slogans — has gone through a "heiti explosion" as electronic screens multiplied.

"Ever since Microsoft YaHei shipped with Windows XP in 2001, almost every foundry has released its own heiti. Heiti is very simple and the files are small; on a small screen, or a screen without much resolution, heiti is easier to read."

In an email to a Dutch designer, Li Zhiqian wrote that "China's type industry is entering its best era" — "but that line isn't mine; a manager at the Founder type foundry told me." Founder, which has fought infringement suits against companies such as Procter & Gamble and Blizzard, has finally moved into profit in the past few years.

"What we can feel is that ordinary people have become more sensitive to type," Rex told QDaily. "What we care about isn't always the typeface itself. A typeface is one element of visual and informational communication, and what interests us is how it develops along with society."

"Pretty stirring, isn't it?" Mira said, of how, combing through documents and checking sources, she keeps seeing type working as a medium of communication. "How people in different eras use type to shape real life and society — that's the part that interests me."

Zheng Chuyang, the man who can place a restaurant by its sign, designed a Uyghur typeface. To do it he traced Xinjiang's tangled writing systems.

The first people to bring modern printing to Xinjiang were Swedish missionaries. In the late nineteenth century they opened a new mission station in Kashgar. In 1912 printing equipment, Arabic matrices, Latin matrices and a small number of Cyrillic matrices arrived from Sweden, and Xinjiang's first print shop was set up.

In 1938 the Swedish missionaries were expelled and the presses were confiscated or destroyed. Xinjiang then came under the influence of Soviet printing technology. In the 1960s a new Uyghur script based on the Latin alphabet was made the region's official script, but in 1982 the old Uyghur script based on the Arabic alphabet was restored.

The printing type fixed in 1982 spread quickly into every public and private space in Xinjiang: newspapers, books, phone apps, airport signs. Zheng Chuyang found that it differed noticeably from what came before, with strokes that had been simplified too far. "The changes may have been made to make casting lead type easier, or they may have been an accidental mistake that nobody corrected, and the mistake became the new standard."

"Modernization, globalization, localization — after these words have risen and fallen a few times, people go back to tradition without noticing, because they believe tradition is solid and reliable, something that can hold the soul in place."

Zheng Chuyang also ran an "experiment" with an anthropologist. He gathered 50 Uyghur students at Zhejiang University and asked what they thought of Frutiger Arabic, a typeface developed by the Arabic specialists at Monotype and already in wide use across many Middle Eastern cities. Forty-nine of the 50 found it strange and comical; they were used to the 1982 printing type. That is where the story at the top, about telling restaurants apart by the lettering on their signs, comes from.

Zheng Chuyang designed his own Uyghur typeface and a city signage system, giving up on radical changes. He showed it to friends in Xinjiang and they liked it, but in the end the government did not adopt it.

"Only once you understand the chaos they have been through historically, one visual system after another overturned and rebuilt, can you understand their conservatism," Li Zhiqian said.

Last year TIB started running study trips built around type and design, called Type Tour. The first stop was Tokyo. "More people signed up than we expected, and in the end we picked 11, balancing industry, age and the ratio of men to women." The first to sign up, Li Zhiqian told us, was Ding Yi, founder of Makefont. We have reported before on this type studio in Weifang, Shandong, which designed the Chinese typefaces for Shanghai Disneyland.

"I think the only way it makes sense is to actually go somewhere, connect with people, and understand their type design inside its own context. A lot of Chinese designers slip easily into imagining things or forcing connections, which may be a long-standing bad habit. You see the work of a so-called master and feel it is good, but you can't say what is good about it or why it was done that way. Only by meeting the designer, asking why, and seeing the visual environment they live in can you understand."

In Japan they visited Typography, at present the only professional magazine in the world devoted to type, published in Japanese and English. "It is a magazine held up by one person — one person commissions and edits. There is a pool of contributors, and the layout and design are outsourced to a firm. But that is normal in Japan's design industry: small and fine."

"Do you know the destination signs you see on Hong Kong minibuses? The ones that go from 'Kowloon City' to 'Wong Tai Sin' — do you know what the different background colors mean?" Type Tour's Hong Kong-Macau-Shenzhen edition visited a Hong Kong shop selling minibus supplies. Li Zhiqian says the distinctive handwritten lettering is printed on signs with different background colors, and alongside place names like "Hung Hom" and "To Kwa Wan" there are phrases like "air-conditioned." The background color marks out the turf of different triad gangs — another piece of street culture that belongs to Hong Kong.

They also tracked down Fung Siu-wah, who lettered the opening titles for The Golden Era and The Grandmaster. Known as Wah Gor, he is Hong Kong's most famous "lettering man." Li Zhiqian jokes that Wah Gor and Hong Kong's calligraphy world look down on each other. "He should probably be called a 'calligraphy designer,' or a 'design calligrapher' — that would fit better. The biggest difference between Chinese calligraphers and their Western counterparts is that calligraphy is part of personal cultivation, so orthodox calligraphers are very averse to commerce. For Wah Gor, this is simply a business."

Besides the story of Western type, TIB also tries to dig out the stories behind Chinese type. The "Shanghai Type" project, started by Li Zhiqian and Gong Qijun, is one example. Type designer is not a new job: China had its first generation of them back in the 1950s. They drew the simplified-character typefaces later used in the Cihai dictionary — Song Yi for body text, Hei Yi for running heads and titles.

This oral-history project began by accident. In 2008 Li Zhiqian started a Douban group called "Type Exchange and Appreciation." At the Spring Festival of 2010, a 67-year-old Shanghai uncle turned up at one of the group's offline meetups. His name was Chen Qirui, born in 1943, one of Shanghai's first-generation type designers.

Chen Qirui later wrote for TIB about that meeting: he had come across the group by chance and found young people picking up a subject forgotten for years — type — and arguing about it with enthusiasm.

"Seeing these topics, sitting in front of my screen, I badly wanted to join in, but the only input I could use was the handwriting mode in Sogou Pinyin, and writing stroke by stroke with a mouse is slow and exhausting. I wasn't a member of the group either, and I had no idea how to upload images or link to other files. All I could do was watch them argue away, time after time, and shut down the computer with regret."

When he saw the notice for the offline meetup, Chen Qirui brought along a bag of type drafts he had drawn himself. Li Zhiqian still remembers listening to him talk and demonstrate as if he were listening to a legend. Chen Qirui also became the first person interviewed for "Shanghai Type."

In 1956 printing technology research institutes were set up in Beijing and Shanghai at the same time. In 1960 the Shanghai institute opened a research office devoted to type design; the next year Chen Qirui, fresh out of the Shanghai Publishing and Printing College, joined it. They went on to issue the 《汉字印刷字体技术规范》 (Technical Specifications for Chinese Character Printing Typefaces).

The office carries the marks of the revolutionary years. In 1967 the people judging typefaces were not professional designers but workers, peasants and soldiers. Chen Qirui recalled that this was "the most revolutionary, most fashionable approach of the day." For "workers" they went to printing plants and newspaper offices; for "soldiers," the East Sea Fleet; for "peasants," they made a special trip to Taicang in Jiangsu to find Gu Atao, a model farmworker. Chen Qirui and his colleagues spread the type samples out in the fields and had Gu Atao circle and tick the ones she liked. She could not, in fact, read.

Not long after the Cultural Revolution began, the Shanghai Printing Technology Research Institute was dissolved. To integrate them with workers, peasants and soldiers, type designers were sent down to the front line of matrix production — the type foundry. Shanghai Type Foundry No. 1 absorbed a large number of designers and later formed a "drawing group." The foundry had been established in 1956 on the base of the Huafeng Type Foundry, one of the larger Shanghai foundries of the Republican era, merged with more than 30 small ones. Before phototypesetting spread, Shanghai Type Foundry No. 1 had a monopoly on the whole matrix trade, supplying matrices, lead type and other products to printing plants around the country; business was brisk. It was a special, controlled industry — you needed a letter of introduction to buy lead type.

When printing technology was this narrow, lead type had to be tightly controlled. Li Zhiqian and Gong Qijun, the other person running Shanghai Type, once found a 1968 file written by Shanghai Type Foundry No. 1 to the Shanghai Publishing Bureau.

"Lead type is a political product. In the hands of us proletarian revolutionaries it can become shells fired at the enemy; if the enemy gets hold of it, it can also serve them as a tool for counter-revolutionary activity. Since the proletarian revolutionaries took power at this plant, we have adopted a series of measures over the release and management of lead type, and we have uncovered cases of bad elements forging official seals in an attempt to buy lead type from this plant for criminal activity."

Even different factions inside the same work unit came into conflict over buying lead type: "This faction demanded we not supply lead type to that faction, and that faction told us not to supply this faction."

A user named jikaiwen, who had studied at the Shanghai Printing and Publishing College, left a comment recalling a visit to the drawing group at Type Foundry No. 1 in those years: "One desk lamp each, and the workers traced characters — Song, imitation Song, Hei, Kai… — on slips of paper an inch square. Some of the chair seats had two grooves worn into them by people's backsides… Nobody back then realized this was work with beauty in it, and nobody thought to take a photo to mark the occasion. I remember the matrix factory even came to our school to recruit. After seeing the grooved chairs, my classmates scattered and fled in fright, ha!" Li Zhiqian was never able to find this user.

Only when the Cultural Revolution ended was the Shanghai Printing Technology Research Institute restored. Li Zhiqian found a Ministry of Education document dated April 20, 1978, the "Notice on the Question of the Typeface Used for Quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Chairman Mao in Textbooks," which ended the practice of setting such quotations in heiti to mark them out.

Type Foundry No. 1's good years ran to the end of the 1980s. Old workers recall that as late as the mid-1980s the foundry was still handing more than 100,000 yuan in tax to the state every year. After reform and opening, type designers raised under the planned economy found a new stage abroad. The Japanese type company Morisawa opened its design competition to the mainland, and designers at the printing research institute entered eagerly. Two winning typefaces, by Lu Huaping and Xu Xuecheng, were later developed by the Shanghai institute into complete font libraries. The Japanese side paid a design fee of US$11 per character, which became one way for these state-owned firms to earn money.

As new printing technology arrived, lead type was replaced and demand kept falling, and the trades and the people who lived off traditional lead-type printing slipped into obscurity. "They had come up through the planned economy, and suddenly they found there was no plan any more, and they didn't know what to do."

Alongside Shanghai Type, Type Tour and a podcast called TypeChat, TIB plans to launch its own publication this year. "But you can't say that we've done all this just to find a roundabout way of attracting a big audience," Mira told us. "Design is itself a means. However well something is designed, it still comes back to how the characters are used, where they are used, and what message they carry. That may be the most important part."

Cover image: Stocksnap