AIZI / AI字 / 爱字

A Latin typeface contains a mere 400 to 700 glyphs, on average. Thanks to the alphabetic system, these relatively few characters can spell out every word that exists in a given language. A single style of a Chinese font must contain a minimum of 6,763 commonly used glyphs to be of any use, while typefaces for literary use, for instance, need thousands more. Famous Chinese historical dictionaries contains between 47,000 and 54,000 hanzi (characters), the most complete going to the incredible number of 106,230.

Thus, creating a Chinese can only be achieved though long time and team effort. Those two elements are inhibiting creativity. First, it makes type foundries tend to not take risks with their design. Second, it prevent freelance designers (Chinese or not) to design for the script, which volume makes it unattainable. This situation cuts type designers for a script used by 900 million native speakers of Mandarin language, and around 400 million second-language readers.

The output of the research project is a database, of the different glyph constructions that exists in Chinese. It currently covers 90,000 hanzi, and will be freely accessible online, as a encouragement for the type design technological scene to develop. The project was also the occasion to think about the role of computer-aided design in the field of typography, its future development, and its application within the field of type design education.