By Kathy Ruoran Li, Junior Project Manager, Art-Science
In digital typography, a Chinese typeface needs to cover at least 6,763 glyphs to compose basic texts. In Latin typography, a comparable set would be around 400 glyphs. As a result, creating a Chinese typeface translates to a considerable investment, which becomes a barrier for freelance individuals who compose the majority of the type design industry in the 21st century. The number of existing Chinese fonts available is extremely small, in contrast to the fact that Chinese has the biggest number of first-language users. But this situation may change. Researchers from ECAL (University of Art and Design Lausanne) and EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) are working on an AI project, AIZI, that might change the work process of Chinese type designers.
AIZI stands for “Artificial Intelligence Chinese Character”. It can also be written as AI字, or even 爱字 - “love of typography” in Chinese. It is a joint research project between Master Type Design at ECAL and Computer Vision Lab at EPFL to help the creation of Chinese digital typefaces with the use of artificial intelligence.
Swissnex in China was pleased to partner with ECAL (University of Art and Design Lausanne) and organized two events, at Juanzong Books and Art & Design Education Exhibition “FutureLab”, respectively. Across the two events, four speakers ranging from ECAL type design professor to Shanghai-based type designer delved into the topic of utilizing AI in Chinese type design, as well as AIZI and its future prospect.
At Juanzong Books, from front row left to right: Shuhui Shi, Di Tao, ZHENG Chuyang.
At the hybrid event on November 27, Matthieu Cortat, Head of Master Type Design at ECAL, introduced the research projects conducted at EPFL. Of all the arts school in Switzerland, ECAL has the ability to run research projects with a wide range of interests and domains, that goes from product design, photography, to art.
Matthieu Cortat’s recent project, Rationalist Lettering and Architecture in Fascist Rome, in 2018
ECAL’s Color Library research project analyzed the existing techniques of CMYK and proposes a new color library for graphic designs.
AIZI started in 2018 as the diplomat project of Shuhui Shi, a graphic and type designer, and also our second speaker of the event. With the collaboration of researchers at EPFL, AIZI has taken one step further beyond a student project.
Currently, AIZI cannot achieve the target level yet, but results have been improving.
Shuhui introduced the goal of AIZI - with the help of AI, Chinese type designers only need to design 500 characters, and then AI would generate the rest. She adopted the technology of Style Transfer and GAN to teach AI to read as many pictures as possible, so they can generate results of a target style.
zi2zi (Yuchen Tian, 2017) used these technologies and is now the foundation of many other AI-based design of typefaces.
Shuhui started by training the AI using an upgrade version of zi2zi model, and discovered that this existing model cannot generate satisfying results across different styles of typefaces - it does not work well on fonts with straight vertical and horizontal strokes. To solve this issue, Shuhui came up with a different approach by breaking down each Chinese character’s composition.
Shuhui proposed a Layout System that can cover any Chinese character.
Shuhui then introduced the AI training process and how she improved the approach to ensure the desired outcomes of horizontal and vertical strokes. Going forward, she would continue to adjust the proportion of characters to keep improving the results.
AIZI’s AI can already achieve the result demonstrated in the P2 column.
At the time of the event on November 27th, AIZI achieved a milestone and successfully established a website (http://aizi.ch/) proposing a database of 90,000 entries that decomposes Chinese characters into radicals and components. The online database is open-sourced, and the website is embedded with a search function for any designer to utilize. AIZI will continue to develop and collaborate with new partners.
Shuhui’s introduction is followed by the presentations of two locally based type designers, ZHENG Chuyang and Di Tao. Chuyang is the founder of 3type & Mallikātype, he reflected on what he identified as the most important thing of typefaces. Mallikātype specialized in large-scale typefaces and is currently working on several projects, including a collaboration with a Dutch partner. Following a pictorial survey of their previous designs, Chuyang shared his thinking from his years of experience as a type designer, and how Chinese is unique from other written scripts.
Chuyang shared how he approached the different composition styles of Chinese characters and how it affect the design process.
Then, Di Tao, a type designer at Monotype Studio, talked about the difference between Hanzi and Latin type design. Di had the experience of designing Chinese, Japanese, and Latin typefaces. Not only the number of minimum glyphs required is drastically different, but the complexity of the structure is also not comparable in Latin and Chinese characters. Therefore, the design processes are completely different. Using some of his previous works, Di briefly walked the audience through how a type designer would generally approach Chinese typefaces.
When designing a Japanese typeface, Di drew inspiration from inscriptions on Chinese ancient stone tablets.
At a separate event on December 5, Matthieu Cortat and Shuhui Shi present the AIZI project to an on-site audience at Art and Design Education (FutureLab), an education exhibition that ran from November 28 to December 5, 2021, at West Bund Dome, Shanghai.
Matthieu discussed in more details about the type design education offered at ECAL, and his take on Chinese type design. Shuhui also gave a more detailed breakdown of the AIZI project development process and shared her study and research experience at ECAL.
Shuhui Shi introducing AIZI at Art and Design Education (FutureLab).
Among our audience, we had many designers joining the events. We would like to thank everyone for their participation in the Q&A session, and we hope AIZI can continue its great work and that it would facilitate the work of Chinese type designers in the future.
If you have further questions for our speakers regarding their work, please email us at artscience.china@swissnex.org. We will try our best to forward them to our speakers.
Click here to watch the recording of the hybrid event on November 27.