«The writing is on the wall, and Internet. Social media is font of profit, promotion for Chinese mainland typeface designers»

Based on a story on jiemian.com, with additional reporting by Liao Fangzhou
Global Times

«There are about 600 kinds of typefaces for Chinese characters in the Chinese mainland. In Taiwan and Hong Kong it's even lower: 300 and 100, respectively. In Japan, there are at least 3,000.

»What accounts for the scarcity? In the 2000s, typography became hardly profitable as online piracy took off.

»A serious decline

»This wasn't the case in the 1990s and before, when major publishing houses and printing companies licensed directly from dozens of typography businesses. The annual revenue was billions of yuan.

»To compete with low-priced or even free pirated copies, typography companies had to cut prices dramatically. It was a losing war.

»A typeface by the company Hanyi that originally cost 1,000 yuan ($154.54) to license was discounted to just 50 yuan, and its earnings dropped to tens of thousands of yuan a year.

»The sector shrank to just five companies, including Hanyi and the industry's largest operator, Fangzheng. They barely made profits.

»Meanwhile, they had to fight hard to defend copyrights. In 2007, Fangzheng sued video game company Blizzard Entertainment for copyright infringement in its Chinese version of World of Warcraft, and in 2008 filed against consumer goods company Procter & Gamble over one of its shampoo brands.

»The case against Blizzard went on for five years including an appeal, eventually ruling in Fangzheng's favor and awarding it 2 million yuan; Fangzheng had sought compensation of 100 million yuan.

»After three years, Fangzheng lost the case to Procter & Gamble. The court's verdict was that the product's advertising designer made the brand's typeface in authentic character-design software, instead of infringing Makefont, a typographic design company born in 2009.

»For smaller companies and independent typographers, long, costly litigation is out of the question.

»Self-won justice

»The rise of social media like Sina Weibo around 2010, however, meant that typographers do not have to go to court to be taken seriously. They could simply post their protests.

»In 2011, the domestic romantic comedy Love Is Not Blind became a blockbuster, earning 300 million yuan at the box office.

»Makefont announced on its official Weibo account that the film widely used one of its typefaces without courtesy, and invoiced the production company for the 20,000 yuan licensing fee.

»The production company, the Beijing Branch Company of the China Film Group Corporation, had rejected an invoice that Makefont had sent privately earlier. But under fire from social media, it succumbed.

»Right after the third-season debut of I Am a Singer, an ultra-popular live show by Hunan TV, Makefont said on Sina Weibo that the show used one of its typefaces without permission and asked for a licensing fee of 150,000 yuan. They settled privately, though Makefont did not disclose details of the deal.

»Also using social media, Makefont successfully defended its copyright against its work used for a Samsung washing machine, a Sony camera and the Wanda Cinemas.

»A painstaking design

»Typography is a painstaking and expensive process. To design a typeface for Chinese, 6,763 characters is the minimum, and it is not uncommon to work on 10,000 to 20,000 characters. Typographers must draw and adjust every character stroke by stroke.

»“The inputs in one font can be hundreds of thousands of yuan, or even more than a million. It is very time-consuming, as it can take a team more than a year to design and make one font, and a few months at the least,” Ding Yi, typographer and the founder of Makefont, told the Global Times.

»Ying Yonghui, a typographer, told the Time Weekly that many young designers would give up halfway. “It is OK to design dozens of Chinese characters, but hundreds and thousands of them means too much for many,” Ying said.

»Changing landscape

»Social media also holds conventional advantages for typographers; designers can launch products and attract potential clients through the online platforms.

»The country's new typography studios, which mostly came into existence around 2009 like Makefont, are active on Weibo, the culture reviewing site douban.com, and the Quora-like zhihu.com.

»After Li Xiangchen dropped out of high school in 2008, he went to Beijing and decided that he would become a typography designer.

»In 2010, his retro-style font called “Kangxi Dictionary” went viral on social media and found its way into numerous souvenirs and gift packages in both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan.

»Eventually Li sold the copyright outright to an essence oil brand. Today, he has founded a typographic design start-up in the capital.

»In 2010, Ding Yi saw the Chinese poster for Disney's film Alice in Wonderland and found the typeface of the Chinese title incompatible with the English.

»He spent an afternoon designing his own version (pictured above) and posted it on his blog, which was later widely circulated on the Internet and caught the attention of Disney itself.

»Two years later, Disney approached Ding Yi to tailor a Chinese typeface for the Shanghai Disney Resort.»