Archive | Originally published 2021-09-23. Ages, crowdfunding progress and current affairs are retained as reported at the time. Please refer to the product pages for current availability and licensing.
A Hong Kong type designer: protecting the city’s letterforms within the character square
Sharp, angled strokes respond to feelings of defence and resistance in Hong Kong at the time.
Written language has ideas as well as form. As times change, how can a sheet of old calligraphy speak across generations and reveal different understandings of art? What new thinking accompanies a new typeface? We begin with the letterforms.
Li Hon Kong Kai was Hong Kong’s first successfully crowdfunded typeface based on street calligraphy. Its restoration took nearly five years, and it reached its crowdfunding target in late 2020 before becoming available to buy. The original forms were written by the late street calligrapher 李漢 and restored by 李健明, the son of a close friend.
李健明 prefers to call himself a sign maker rather than a type designer. Having grown up around sign production, he does not describe lettering as an art that captivated him; he even recalls disliking art lessons as a child. To him, letters are inseparable from everyday life. 李漢’s forceful, rough-edged forms were part of Hong Kong’s streetscape in the 1980s and 1990s, carrying the old city’s refusal to be pushed around. Their connected strokes also preserve practical knowledge from earlier sign makers.
As neon signs came under tighter regulation and sign production became digital, the appearance of Hong Kong’s streets gradually changed. Letterforms became easier to obtain, while type design developed as a specialised practice.
For Roy Chan, a type designer born in the 1990s, type is an art of black-and-white forms. Yet treating it as art does not remove the problem of unlicensed downloads, which makes the already demanding development of Traditional Chinese fonts harder to sustain.
He founded Moodmen Font in response to that context, drawing around 200 different styles of lettering over a year and a half, each covering anything from ten to a few dozen characters. He sees public education as urgent, while social-media attention rewards novelty. Working within a commercial environment also means spending time on product development and marketing rather than drawing. Neither man’s relationship with making letters is easily reduced to a few words.
A bag of 李漢’s calligraphic sheets became a project that raised around HK$700,000. Meanwhile, the kinds of letterforms Hong Kong people sought increasingly carried an emotional charge.
Both the value of type and what it signifies were changing.
Once valued primarily for practical visibility, sign lettering had become a symbol of local culture. New designs also emerged alongside the emotions of recent years. Roy felt that ideas of defence and resistance needed a typographic outlet.
His idea of a typeface for Hong Kong people, Reborn, began to take shape and drew him towards crowdfunding a complete font. He imagined fire, twenty-degree angles and a sense of pain: fierce forms that nevertheless kept their energy inside the character square, only answering back when intruded upon. It was an analogy between the type and the people.
As freedom narrowed and some words became restricted, could typefaces face the same fate? 李健明 laughed at the question. In his view, Li Hon Kong Kai could be used and interpreted in countless ways. If no single use was prescribed, what would it mean to ban the typeface itself?
‘Fortunately, that has not happened yet. I mean not yet; I do not know what will happen in the future.’ Roy was not particularly anxious about the prospect at the time.
He believed that even where words were restricted, the possibilities of communication remained too broad to be contained entirely by rules. ‘That is how design works: you cannot ban the ideas in people’s minds.’ Making Traditional Chinese type was difficult, and doing so in Hong Kong brought further challenges; those circumstances also gave the work a character particular to its time and place.
