Peking Poster
Contributed by Briefcase Type Foundry on Aug 16th, 2014. Artwork published in
.
A poster, presenting Czech schools at an exhibition in Beijing; designed by Matěj Hanauer using the newly digitized Briefcase Šijan by Petr Babák.
License: All Rights Reserved.
License: All Rights Reserved.
License: All Rights Reserved.
License: All Rights Reserved.
3 Comments on “Peking Poster”
The Chinese characters are set in FounderType’s Lantinghei series (兰亭黑), designed by the foundry’s senior designer, Li Qi (齐立). The name reads “Lanting Gothic”, and “Lanting” references Chinese calligrapher Xizhi Wang (王羲之)'s famous work, Lanting Jixu (兰亭集序).
Lantinghei’s regular and bold weights were later extracted, based on which Microsoft and Monotype collaborated to develop a very similar Microsoft YaHei (微软雅黑), the Windows UI typeface starting from Vista. YaHei’s bold weight is interestingly named “Negrata”.
The skeleton features of some radicals are modified, and Segoe are packed into the font files for Latin coverage. Monotype added the hinting data.
As a commercial, print-focused typeface, Lantinghei was continually expanded after the Microsoft deal. Microsoft again used LantingHei’s light weight for YaHei’s similar weight in 2013.
Apple also partially licenses LantingHei to embed in OS X, with a simplified (Lantinghei SC) and a traditional (Lantinghei HK) variant.
Peiran, thank you so much! This information is very welcome. I’ve created an entry and added a sample for Lantinghei — I hope I got it right.
I see a Lantinghei SC and a Lantinghei TC on my system, each in 3 weights, latter with a smaller character set. I assume TC (Traditional Chinese) = HK (Hong Kong)?
On OS X, the bold styles of Segoe UI and Tahoma show up with the Spanish (or Catalan?) “Negreta” name, too. Looks like localization gone wrong. Here’s a related comment by a JDK forum user:
Florian, the type sample is right. I see you using the English version of Founder’s website on the typeface’s entry page. It may be more accurate to point to the Chinese version, with their own type specimen.
My fault of not double-checking the names—it is indeed Lantinghei TC. But do note that TC is a morphology name, and HK is a locale name, so they don’t always equate. For example, OS X’s new Chinese UI typeface, PingFang (苹方), comes with an SC, a TC, and an HK variant. Though both “Traditional”, Hong Kong and Taiwan follow different official glyph standards. This often means that one glyph slot in Unicode is mapped to multiple variants.
For more of this information, see Adobe and Google’s Source Han Sans, the most technologically advanced typeface to date in terms of East Asian localization: Adobe’s own introduction and GitHub project page
As for the Negreta naming, I am slightly unsure that it is a technical oversight. Even Apple in their own system font manifest uses the name “Tahoma Negreta”. This makes me think that there might be some intention in using this name instead of Bold. I might be wrong, though.