Orange News: the beginnings of Reborn
Archive | Originally published 2022-01-14. Ages, crowdfunding progress and current affairs are retained as reported at the time. Please refer to the product pages for current availability and licensing.
Moodmen Font’s new Traditional Chinese typeface, Reborn, had entered the fourth day of its crowdfunding campaign when this article was published. It had raised around a third of its target, with 55 days remaining. The report followed the project as its outcome was still uncertain.
Type director Roy Chan had described his beginnings in several interviews. Trained in advertising, he encountered attractive fonts without the Traditional Chinese forms he needed and began drawing those characters himself. That familiar design problem eventually led him to establish Moodmen Font, create a Hong Kong typography discussion group and develop Reborn as a typeface with a local character.
Editor: 羅茜
Filming: 張卓傑
Editing: 張卓傑
Design: 何佩雯
Responsible editor: Trista Luo
Editor: Trista Luo
Drawing lettering and developing a typeface
When drawing lettering for a particular phrase, the design needs to suit its context and make the words visually compelling. The studio’s calendars showed many such treatments, each responding to a month’s theme and illustration. The writer singled out December’s ice-and-bubble lettering for its cool, almost melting quality.
Developing a typeface introduces another requirement: consistency across a large character set. It takes repeated adjustment, with even an apparently simple dot needing different treatments according to its position and the character around it.
The project introduction compared a limited Latin set of around 300 characters with a Traditional Chinese set numbering in the thousands. It quoted a 13,051-character division, including 5,401 more frequent and 7,650 less frequent forms, to explain the scale of the work. These were figures used in that historical project account, not a universal definition of either a Latin or Traditional Chinese font: actual coverage depends on languages, encoding and the chosen character set.
‘A senior designer told me that drawing a piece of lettering is like planting a tree, but making a typeface is like building a forest. How you prepare the soil and water so that all the plants relate in height, weight and foliage is a much bigger question,’ Roy said.
Working with letters had made him more aware of his limitations, in design as well as personally. He saw that awareness as a reason to continue. Once a coherent system was established, a new typeface did not have to arrive as something everyone considered perfect; freshness and room for development could also be part of its character.
Reborn: forceful forms with room to adapt
Roy traced Reborn to mid-2020, following a period marked by social movements and the pandemic. The team wanted to make something connected with people’s lives, offering encouragement or giving a feeling a voice. They began with four characters, 香港重生, the first outline of the later typeface.
They then applied the style to familiar song lyrics. The resulting forms seemed able to express the mood of the time, and suggested enough depth to be developed into a reusable character set.
Reborn combines Song and gothic features with its own details. The project diagrams described cone-shaped terminals on horizontals, a hoe-like returning hook, curved returns moving against the usual writing direction, three treatments of dots for different contexts, and optical adjustments to apparent straightness, weight and balance.
Roy felt other lettering designs, including the Moodmen name shown in the article, might also become complete typefaces. He chose Reborn first because he felt it connected more closely with the experience of Hong Kong people at that moment.
Although angular and forceful, Reborn also makes room for quieter details. The bottom horizontal in the 口 component removes the sharper pen-like entry and cone-shaped terminal, replacing them with a gently curved return that narrows towards the left. That softer ending moderates the overall tension.
‘If every part were equally heavy, the result would not work. It is like the problems in society: do we always have to answer with points and angles? Not necessarily. We also need places to ease the tension and move around it,’ Roy said.
The team presented Reborn as a public-participation project, inviting Instagram followers to choose between alternative stroke treatments. The article reported more than ten thousand votes across nine consultation posts, with feedback informing further drawings. ‘If we call it a Hong Kong typeface, but no one has decided what that should look like, we can begin with trials and voting, and develop a closer relationship with users,’ Roy explained.
Words and letterforms belong together
The planned 5,300-character set comprised around 4,900 frequently used Traditional Chinese characters and 400 forms associated with Hong Kong usage, including 嘅, 咁 and 啲. Roy noted that Taiwanese font development often included locally relevant forms and phonetic symbols. He wanted a Hong Kong typeface to retain its own local usage too, allowing readers elsewhere to encounter it through the font.
The studio had also applied lettering to calendars, phone cases, tape, mahjong, red packets, coasters and masks. Some lines were deliberately downbeat, such as phrases about futile effort; others were original reflections on neighbourhood shops, the pressures of city life and the familiar daily meal downstairs. The products brought the wording and its visual treatment together.
Roy said he did not deliberately chase trends, which could move on before a design was finished. He preferred observations from everyday life that might continue to resonate. Even a familiar subject such as Lion Rock, used over several years, still offered room to explore.
Asked what distinguished Moodmen from other lettering practices, Roy paused. ‘Perhaps it is the way we bring together ideas, lettering and products. Words and their forms cannot really be separated. A beautiful type style may still fail to express what you feel, and different forms suit different kinds of content.’
Pointing to Reborn on the wall, he explained that a word meaning strength might feel at home in it, while a word meaning gentleness might call for another treatment. The aim was for the visual form and the meaning to feel plausible together, so the reader could sense an emotion in the letters.
Following the 1,000-character trial released in October 2021, the team opened crowdfunding for the full project. The first stage proposed 5,300 characters. Less frequent forms, including 唏 and 咤, were described as candidates for an 8,800-character second-stage target. Those figures describe the campaign’s plans, not a statement that every stage was ultimately released.
The team acknowledged the complexity and cost of developing a new typeface, but wanted to continue: to offer another Traditional Chinese option, carry its culture forward and give local readers something made in Hong Kong to value. The article ended by asking whether that intention would connect with its readers.
