| Description |
This thesis traces the process of my two years' study. After graduation from college in China with a BFA degree in graphic design, I still felt something was missing in my education, that is, the typography experiments. It became one of the reasons I chose to pursue graduate study in the US, a Western country with an excellent legacy in visual communication study. I became familiar with the history of the Western typography from the first few projects. With a Chinese background, I thought about applying those methodologies into a Chinese graphic language. In order to do that, I studied the similarities and the differences between the Chinese and the English written language. From the result of the comparison study, I noticed the close relationship between the Chinese language and the square form. I remember it was addressed on the first day of Chinese in elementary school. However, during this research project I studied this connection on a much deeper level. The English typographic experiments always break the rules in the traditional letterpress. The Arts and Crafts Movement emphasized book layout design, starting the development of numerous typefaces in the late 19th century. The modernist era, during the 20th century, broke down the rules in art and shattered traditional layout approaches. These historical events influenced the way I approached typography study. Upon experimentation, I tried to bring a fresh approach to the Chinese typography and named my study "break the square." Breaking the tradition and creating new approaches is a lifetime philosophy. For the initial phase of my study in these two years, I hope that the"break the square" study could use the square, a form that was studied for thousands of years throughout the; world, to bring to Westerners a basic understanding of the Chinese written language. |
