A Birth Of An Artwork—The Research Of Fang Song Font Development

Typographic of Chinese characters plays a significant role in the inheritance and dissemination of Chinese culture. FangSong, one of the "Four Major printing Chinese Typeface", was firstly developed in the early 20 th century. As the printing character emerging after the technique amalgamation of old and new printing technology, FangSong font is an indispensible part of typographic design research. However, theoretical research and cultural trait are neglected in recent researches of FangSong font. In this paper, we discuss the origin, development, and current state of FangSong font, and conclude the developing history of FangSong typeface. The order of this paper is trying to provide a reference to the FangSong font design with the support of cultural and historical. Main works of this paper are as follows.Firstly, this paper discusses the origin of FangSong typeface, in which named "Ju-Zhen FangSong" typeface created by the Ding Brothers is the sign of its development through historical background, social environment and other point of view. Secondly, we focus on the development FangSong typeface in " the lead type age" of China, 1920 s to 1980 s. We study the creation, usage, improvement and other aspects of different FangSong typeface created by printing and publishing institution in the Republic of China era, and discuss the development of it after the founding of New China. Thirdly, we analyze the development of handwriting FangSong, a different style from typographic through engineering drawing, mimeograph and artistic calligraphy areas. In the end, this paper investigates various computer FangSong fonts. With the comparison and mechanical analysis between different Fangsong fonts, Song-Arial and blackbody of Chinese, we show the current danger faced by FangSong font and make a discussion that the direction of FangSong font development in attempts.Although FangSong is a outstanding and peculiarity font, it is still suffering from the problems as less application, similarity, bad computer displaying for few cultural specialty research was take into consideration in its font design. Therefore, implementing the research of the FangSong font may helpful to promote its design.