| 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 o f 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 o f 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 o f 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 o f years throughout the world, to bring to Westerners a basic understanding of the Chinese written language. |
