1.Rise and fall

When it comes to “movable type”, the owner of Ri Xing Type Foundry Chien-Kuan Chang made the following comment at the annual meeting of TED x Taipei “Fl!P,” “Printing is a process of continuous copying; we need to have the copper mold for type before being able to produce type character, and with the type character produced, we will be able to print. This is a kind of copy and also a kind of ‘flip’.”

In the age when computer typesetting was not available, movable type printing was once the best. The production process is complicated and focuses on details from typecasting, character picking, layout arranging, printing to binding as well as the demand of combining various technologies. It is a technique with long history and needs time to settle down.

2.A unique beauty
The culture of Chinese character has a long history, and every word has its story. More and more people are learning simplified Chinese character in recent years, but it loses the original meaning of the character even though simplified Chinese character is with few strokes and easy to write as well as effectively enhance the literate population in China. “Beauty” is not able to be simplified, and the beauty of Chinese character hides in every stroke of traditional Chinese character. We learn not only how to write but also how to appreciate the intensive culture.

With computer typesetting becoming the main stream, we are losing the attention and taste towards word character. Less and less people think about font design seriously and no one cares about the issues as “what font is used on the sign along the road?” and “what font should be used on sign post?” If more and more font in the future is designed by China and Japan, the market for traditional Chinese character will become smaller and smaller and lose the right of speech that it used to have.

The styling and writing of the font condense the history memory and culture connotation, and they will finally decline and disappear along with the industry decline without well digital preservation. What we will lose is not only the font but also our own culture. The promotion of traditional Chinese character should not be only limited in the aspect of Chinese language teaching but also expand to each corner that the word is used in daily life. For many people, the decline of movable printing industry seems to have no influence in their life but it is usually the indifferent attitude that we hold causes the loss of the invaluable things and leaves more pity and regret.

Master Chien-Kuan Chang said, “Each type character is a piece of landscape painting, and the time used in producing type character eight hours a day is appreciating art work.” Each detail of movable type presents the beauty and vitality of the word; industry might decline and disappear but art will exist forever.

Source of information:
  Throughout the word, and Retro the beauty of ‘type’
  http://tedxtaipei.com/articles/2013-chien-kuan-chang/
  The Road of Typecasting:張介冠 (Chien-Kuan Chang) at TEDxTaipei 2013
  Viewpointepisode Typecasting people (promo)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ5QV03vMNM
  Learning font at Ri Xing Type Foundry http://blog.justfont.com/2014/06/go-to-rixing/

Data compilation: Chih-Yu, Shao-Ting
Photo taken by the camera team of CRS