#2
My thesis is not about simply creating an interesting Korean typeface. Since my goal of this thesis is to provide more font choices to designers in Korea, I want to create a neutral typeface which can be widely used in various designs. To serve this purpose, I will create a typeface that looks good in a big size and is readable in a small text.
I do not want the thesis to become a mere self-study of Korean typography. Although I will challenge myself by exploring Korean typography, I do not want to stop at the stage of creating a font. My goal for the thesis is also to provide the typeface to Korean designers, who have very few choices of typefaces to work with. Therefore, I decided to build a website as a means to distribute the typeface that I design.
I want the website to be kept in a very simple user-friendly format with one or two pages. Because the focus is oin creating a typeface, not designing a web site, I will keep the site as basic as possible, so that it functions as a simply way for designers to access the font.
Rather than following footsteps of traditional Korean typefaces, I decided to follow a different approach to design a font, which is a new movement among Korean leading typographers. There are 28 characters in Korean, and multiple characters are combined to form a syllable. Traditionally, the combination of the characters for a syllable always has to fit in a square box, and this rule requires designing for each combination of characters for each syllable. Therefore, this rule requires designing more than a thousand characters to accomodate different combinations of the characters fitted in a square box. Hence, recent typographers decided to break the rule, and encourage other designers to design typefaces that do not require the combination of the characters to fit in a square, thus requiring only 72 characters to design. I also find that this recent approach provides visual rhythm and flow whereas the traditional Korean typeface is locked in a square and has a rigid visual effect.
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October 6, 2008 at 9:59 am
Although this text continues to develop good ideas and direction for your thesis, you are not experimenting with the idea of “voice” in your writing. Here is something to try: write one or two sentences that describe the final typeface that you envision. How would you describe the typeface for an American design audience, a Korean design audience, and for someone who is not familiar with typography?