typeworship: Xu Bing: The fusion of English and Chinese First, we recently announced that Type Desig
typeworship: Xu Bing: The fusion of English and Chinese First, we recently announced that Type Designer, Toshi Omagari, is our new interviewees for the forthcoming book, 8 Faces Collected. Toshi discusses his work on playful designs, such as Sir Quentin Blake’s handwriting typeface and the variable width typeface, Cowhand, through to his groundbreaking Tibetan designs for the monolithic Noto Sans for Google. During the interview Toshi introduced me to the work of artist, Xu Bing, and described how it had sparked an idea for a typeface. Xu Bing developed his unique square word calligraphy, that fuses written English words with the square format of Chinese characters. Although the arrangement of the letters within the English words are altered to form the square shapes they remain legible. Each then takes on the form of an ideogram and symbolises a thought within a word. The above reads: Square word Xu Bing It becomes easy to read once you become attuned to the structure of the words. For example the top image on this post reads: “Art for the people Xu Bing” The one beneath it reads: Jack and JillWent up the hillTo fetch a pail of waterJack fell downAnd broke his crownAnd Jill came tumbling afterNursery Rhymes FiveXu Bing Can you decipher these? -- source link
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