My Logo Design Inspiration: Chinese Character Forming
Let’s start with a question: “How do you remember English words?” The “remember” here is to the point that you can write the words out from your memory. I think most people would say the answer is pronunciation. For example, how do you remember the word “Inspiration”? In most case, people would remember it according to its pronunciation “in-spi-ra-tion”, so that they can write each letter out to form the whole word completely.
However, it is a totally different language system in Chinese. Chinese uses characters to form different words. So, before you can remember a word, you need to remember characters. Then, how do you remember a Chinese character? I would say basically by picture memory, after that, adding some pronunciation memory. It is so different from English because Chinese was generated from ancient drawings. The characters now are developed from those drawings and thus still remain as an image for each character basically. That is why when you need to write a Chinese character, you would need to think of the whole character as a picture, then draw it out in a sense. But the next question is “how could people remember so many different pictures/characters?” The myth is the meaning. Every Chinese character has its own meaning and deeply connected with its form either by the likeness of a real figure or combination of several figures. To me, a Chinese character just like a logo itself, a picture with meaning by different connections. Thinking about how I learned and remember Chinese characters when I was little, I find that inspires me a lot consciously or unconsciously when I am doing logo design now.
Characterizing & Transforming
The leftmost character in the picture above is “水” which means water in oracle bone inscription form, the oldest Chinese character form. As you can see, it is more like a drawing than a writing. Actually all the characters in the oracle bone inscription time were just a kind of simplified sketch of objects. They all characterized the object, then represent it as a symbol. Just like the water character here, it caught the flowing and dropping characteristics of water, characterized all those into one simple sketch. When people see the sketch, they could quickly get the characteristics in it and recognize it represents water. When I am designing a logo for a brand, I think it as a process of characterizing the brand. The logo is just like the Chinese character working as a symbol with meaning. The experience of seeing those ancient Chinese characters and understanding why they look like that when I was learning Chinese kinda teach me the way to think and to create meaningful symbol, the logo.
Chinese characters have not always been as how they look right now. They changed so many times along with the Chinese history. You can see in the pictures above, how the characters that represented water and horse have changed to the modern forms now we are using. The rules in the transformation are simplifying, styling or standardizing. Because a drawing of a object could be very diversified, there were actually many forms of water character in oracle bone inscription even though they all have the water characteristics. During the development of Chinese characters, Chinese people have been trying to make them easier to remember and to write by simplifying, styling and standardizing the strokes that make up the characters. Sometimes when we compare the modern form of one character with its ancient forms, it could be difficult to tell they all actually mean the same because they just look so different. Just like the horse characters, if removing the three characters in the middle, can you tell the rightmost one has been developed from the leftmost one? Probably not. That is why I think the transforming process is also like an abstracting process. I admire the effectiveness of the transforming process of Chinese characters, they have turn all those complicated detailed drawings into the simple clean characters without losing the meaning they represent. I think that is an important ability when designing logos. I feel like it inspires me to imagine if there is a more simple form to represent the same meaning when I am designing a logo, and also inspires me with the rules it has been using — simplifying, styling and standardizing.
Combining
Among all different Chinese characters, most of them are outcomes of combination of other characters. That is why Chinese children always learn those single figure characters first when they start, such as water, fire, person, sun, moon, etc. Those are the fundamental parts of Chinese characters. A lot of characters are actually combinations of those single figure characters. By doing so, the combination character would have all the meanings of its parts or an associated meaning between the parts. The character above is a combination of character water and heart. The water character on the left side of this character might look different from what I have shown in the former part in this post. That is because when it comes to combination characters, we usually use the three water drops form to represent water. Anyway, the right side of the character above is the character represents heart. So, can you guess what does this character mean? Water goes to heart, that means permeating slowly and deeply. You can see that by combining the character water and heart into one character. The combination now both take the characteristics of water and heart to create a new picture of these two things interacting with each other, which makes all these movement and feelings into its meaning. I think that is why they always say, “When you think of a Chinese character, you think of a picture.” When it comes to logo design, there are always so many things we want to put in one logo. Combining is one usual way that we would use. But the art in it should be like how Chinese character’s combination work, to focus on the connection and make a picture for people to imagine, to feel, not just plain adding up. I think that is the hardest thing to accomplish when doing logo design.
