#phrasing that heading as 'navigating a divide' feels like it's alluding to An Awareness of the political implications n stuff | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rubberbandballqueen · 10 months ago

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when at the library today i picked up a book abt typography to pick up some more theoretical skills there and to no one's surprise it pretended that european languages were the only languages in the world which like whatever i'll still learn what principles it has to teach and then try to reverse-engineer applications to cn font design based on what i know.

despite not trusting the english-language resources available online to be as in-depth or technical as i desire, i got curious and googled "chinese typographic design" anyway n scrolling through the introduction to the first result, you can kind of tell it's not written with a chinese-speaking audience in mind, or at the very least an audience with some semblance of chinese cultural sensitivities bc its section headed by the words "navigating the simplified and traditional divide" goes on to basically say it's an Aesthetic Decision which. well. is certainly a way to pretend you're avoiding politics.

#mostly you get the impression bc one of the first sections is like 'so how do chinese words work?'#and goes on to explain the idea of radicals and components n stuff and it's like If You Knew Literally Any Chinese #even as a foreigner starting to learn you'd understand the concept of semantic radicals #the worm speaks #phrasing that heading as 'navigating a divide' feels like it's alluding to An Awareness of the political implications n stuff #which most people in the west are not actually aware of!! so then to go on and be like #'oh yeah simplified is like swiftly efficient and ~modern~ while traditional holds fast to its cultural roots from a bygone era'#like. this is some stares straight into the camera type shit to me. like you really didn't have to call us bygone y'know.#like i'd have been fine if they were like 'simplified is what's used in the mainland china n is thus used much more frequently'#'whereas traditional is used in taiwan hk and with older communities' like that's Fine you did it you Navigated The Divide #but if you frame it in terms of an aesthetic choice based in how ~modern~ or ~bygone~ you want to feel #then you're going to end up with people who are merely curious abt cn typography bc it's a very foreign language to them #who take that at face value. good lord #AND ALSO they have separate encodings in unicode. like just saying. they are also encoded differently and that's an important thing #you do not know how many times i've downloaded allegedly traditional cn fonts only to discover they expect simplified input #in order to display the glyphs which Are still designed as traditional to be fair but anyway. it's a nuisance.

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