Workshop »Bilingual Typography«

Project 01 | Creating a sign using Latin letters, which complies to the visual aesthetics of Chinese typeface.

The Chinese students dealt with Latin letters (Pinyin) of their name. They used the font »Garamond«. The letters were cut and arranged, creating an abstract sign using Chinese aesthetics. The aim of this project was to deal with the basic parameters of visual communication, e. g. point, line and plane. Related to design with typefaces the students should also deal with parameters of typography, e. g. ascender, hairline and serif.

Project 02 | Creating a bilingual sign by combining Latin letters and Chinese characters.

Using a combination of Latin letters and Chinese characters the students created a new bilingual sign for their own name. The signs should express the semantic meaning of the students name, e. g. 扬 = »up, fly«, and should be readable in both languages. The aim of this project was to work with abstraction and reduction and with the semantic and syntactic dimensions of character sets.

Andrea Schmidt | Chinese-German Art Academy at China Academy of Arts Hangzhou | Winter Term 2008