Lettering in Korea
Anyone who knows me knows how much I like graphical display of language. Some people call that “typography”.
I’ve been in Korea for the past few months, and I’m leaving tomorrow, at least for a little while. Before I go I thought I’d share a few of my favourite instances of lettering I’ve seen around Seoul and Busan. Some of these I liked for what they say, or how they look, or just because they’re representative of hangul calligraphy. Of course most of this is hanzi. A couple of these photos are from friends. Most are from my phone.
I’m not going to transcribe this here but if there are questions about specific ones leave a comment and I’ll let you know what it says or where it’s from, whichever.
Man, these are pretty.
I think my favorite Korean font is probably this one. Not that I have ever had a reason to use it, seeing as I don’t know Korean.
On the Chinese side, my favorite foundry is probably Founder (方正). More examples of Chinese fonts etc. can be found at Digidea’s blog.
The books 字体设计与应用 (王雪青 著）and 字体设计 (天津大学出版社）both have great examples of Chinese graphic/typographic design, as well. I can scan some pages if people are interested.
Saja, the Korean font face you mentioned as a favourite, is quite nice. I particularly like the oblique forms. I’d love to get a working version of that instead of just a pdf.
I agree Founder is one of the better ones out there for Sinitic design. Actually there’s a Chinese font site that has a bunch of Founder’s fonts available for download. Usually though the Unicode names are all messed up so a quick run through a font authoring app might be necessary for most.
cool pic! You see, it is really hard to explain to chinese about how the korean lettrs formed. Actually most of the korean words in using are pronouce chinese character in korean(some pronounciation of words between chinese and korean are really similar).however most of my chinese friends don’t get it.