Launched on the first of this month by Lam and Park-with help from Gabriela Carnabuci, Jonathan Lee, Abby Chen, and Dustin Tong- Ming Romantic is the result of half a decade of research, design, and a complete re-thinking of type design for Chinese characters. We wanted to work with a new palate, and create new forms.” “There’s not a lot of Chinese typography in general. “It came from our very deep desire to understand the space and try to find a way to break through what we perceived as a stagnation, and some of the conventions we saw in existing Chinese type,” says Park. We wanted to work with a new palate, and create new forms.”īut it did bring up a question for Lam and designer YuJune Park, now his partner at their research-based design studio Synoptic Office. If they started to manipulate the shapes of Chinese characters-sharpening them up, thickening the verticals, thinning the horizontals-much like what you see in a modern typeface, could they create a completely new kind of Chinese type? If so, what would it look like? And how could it break with the pre-existing traditions of Chinese type? But in Chinese culture, I think there’s more reservation about that.”

“W ith a Bodoni,”-or other Latin faces, says Lam-“it’s okay to treat the characters as a formal expression. As Lam found, such a typeface in Chinese characters didn’t really exist rather, experimentation in Chinese type tends to lean more toward illustration, relying heavily on the pictogram origins of some Chinese characters. Back Story: Just over five years ago, Caspar Lam was working at NYC-based studio Li, Inc when a client, Vogue China, requested a romantic Chinese font-something in the spirit of Bodoni or another Didone.

Chinese font style name