On the eve of the Ambassadors' Ball 2017, we talked to Adonian Chan, a beneficiary of the charity, and Marisa Yiu, who is leading the organisation’s biggest initiative yet
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? “Most people open WhatsApp,” graphic designer Adonian Chan claims confidently. “So even if you’re not aware of it, we encounter fonts and typography from the moment we wake up.”
And after you’ve noticed one font, others jump out at you. The font on Instagram is different from the one on Facebook. Text on road signs in New York is skinnier than that in Hong Kong. Publisher Vintage Books chose different typefaces for War and Peace and Fifty Shades of Grey.
Fonts may be easy to overlook, but studies show that they alter our reading experience, affect our behaviour and, says Adonian, even define cultures.
“Japanese graphic design has a very distinctive style, but I didn’t think Hong Kong did,” Adonian explains. “Then I began to research calligraphy and discovered there is a really distinctive style called Beiwei Kaishu that is used on traditional Hong Kong street and shop signs. It did not pass on to Mainland China or Taiwan, so it only exists in Hong Kong and Macau.”
A unique Hong Kong font
Adonian was ecstatic at the discovery. Here was something unique to Hong Kong, a little slice of design history that locals can be proud of. But there’s a downside.
“Beiwei is in danger of becoming extinct,” he says. “In the past, shopkeepers hired a calligrapher to draw characters for their shop signs. But now they tend to use fonts from computers. Most fonts on computers are designed to be used at under 12 point size, not for shop signs.”
The clock is ticking, so Adonian has embarked on a mission to save Beiwei. Instead of fighting against people’s ever-growing reliance on technology, Adonian is instead developing Beiwei into a modern typeface that can be installed on phones and computers. If his dream becomes reality, you might one day be able to send your early-morning WhatsApps in Beiwei.
Adonian has also incorporated Beiwei into a variety of projects he has worked on with Trilingua, a graphic design studio he co-founded in 2010. For Detour 2015, an exhibition organised by the Ambassadors of Design charity, Trilingua designed an interactive installation made up of eight neon Beiwei characters that buzzed louder and glowed brighter the closer a viewer got to the installation. When Trilingua designed a traditional bamboo theatre for the West Kowloon Cultural District in 2014, Adonian made sure it had Beiwei signs.