Sunnatura Flensburg
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Peter Glaab and tagged with “hyxingshi”. License: All Rights Reserved.
Sawtooth type for a sign of a cosmetics shop on Norderstraße in Flensburg, Germany.
1 Comment on “Sunnatura Flensburg”
What looks like a custom, somewhat eccentric logotype on first sight is actually the Latin part of a font primarily made for Chinese typography. This is HY Xing Shi. It was produced by the Beijing Hanyi Keyin Information Technology Co., Ltd. in 1994–2009. Beijing Hanyi was established in 1993 and claims to be “the earliest professional [digital] foundry in mainland China”.
With its irregular stroke endings, Xing Shi emulates dry brush calligraphy, albeit in a coarse, stylized way. I can imagine this works reasonably well for Chinese, and in smaller sizes. With Latin letters in a positively uncalligraphic style and in a size this big, the effect is rather comical. Asian fonts typically include a basic set of Latin characters, but they’re often not meant to be used for Latin-based languages. This is especially evident in the proportions and the spacing – see the gap between r and a.