Sensibility in Media: Whose Idea to “Move On”?

In this discussion I refer to the Straits Times article published 21 Jan, entitled “Enough about ministers’ pay, time to focus on economy: S’poreans”.

http://www.straitstimes.com/The-Big-Story/The-Big-Story-1/Story/STIStory_758185.html

Ministerial pays have always been used time and time again as a voting carrot for Opposition parties. Having the highest paid ministers in the world, this issues has attracted much controversy and debate. The recent elections made amplified the elected Opposition’s voice in parliament, which helped make the debate much livelier and even exciting to watch.

This article points out the eagerness of the Singaporean population to ‘move on’ and focus on more important things like the economy. I feel that the media might be instructing more than it should in terms of political matters. I remember a photo posted on Facebook that outlined the differences in headlines for the ministerial paycuts.

For example, in international news agencies, headlines were “Singapore Leaders face massive pay cut” (AP), “Singapore PM Takes Big Pay Cut, Still World’s Best Paid Leader” (ABC).

Where as Singapore presses’ headlines were decidedly much more subtle and painted the ministers in favourable light: “Ministers’ pay cut proposal: Most welcome pay cuts, ST poll shows”, “S’poreans welcome ministerial pay cut”.

It seems like the ST is fond of using Singaporeans to ‘talk’ to Singaporeans. Yet with issues like this, it seems there’s always a huge pool of very ‘sensible’, government-friendly citizens whose opinions get published. The Singaporean society is evolving much quicker, and online voices are diverse with various dissident voices in the thousands on social media like Facebook and Twitter. Many are still talking about it, and wanting a lower pay scale, or one that does more than effect a symbolic change.

In conclusion, our press seems to lag behind the current development of society, especially in their responses to official matters. Perhaps due to the government’s valuing of sensibility, scores of ‘sensible’ Singaporeans, no matter how few or many, will always take precedence in coverage.

空白

寧可空白了手

等待一次 真心的擁抱。

Why he did not vote for Ma Ying-Jeou.

Most Singaporeans ‘feel’ that Ma Ying-jeou is the better one among the three. But my Taiwanese friend felt otherwise.

Recently I’ve been quite caught up personally with Taiwanese politics. I find it fascinating. Unlike Singapore, Taiwan’s political system is multifarious. It has two main parties, the incumbent Kuomingtang of China (國民黨), Progressive Democratic Party (民進黨). The former is known as the ‘Blue camp’, (藍營) and latter ‘Green Camp’ (綠營).

If Singaporeans voted at the Taiwanese presidential election, it would be a landslide victory for the Blue camp with Ma Ying-Jeou. Everyone whom I spoke to felt that Ma was the better candidate opposed to Tsai Ing-wen of the Green camp.

In every election, without neglecting the obvious need to scrutinize each side, ultimately, as a voter, you need to ‘feel’ which candidate you want. Some vote based on a host of detailed rationales, others on looks, but all have to consider the ‘feeling’ they have.

Below is the conversation I had with my friend who voted for Ma’s main competitor, Tsai Ing-wen. Here’s what we talked about. I hope this will shed light into the political background of Taiwan.

JiRo: May I know why didn’t you vote for Ma?

JiRo: I would like to understand.

Firstly, I feel that Ma’s bilateral policies with China isn’t transparent. Secondly, Taiwan is being held by the nose by China. Thirdly, many expenses were expensive and ineffective. I believe that Tsai’s rationalism makes her stand out from many other traditional politicians. She can alleviate Taiwan out of her current state of problems and chart a new progression. Not simply gravitating towards China. That’s all I can say.

And the thing that I cannot accept the most, is the 1992 consensus. Because it simply does not exist. Ma Ying-jeou keeps insisting that it exists.

JiRo: Then, regarding the same problematic cast of people from former Pres Chen Shui-bian’s era reappearing in Tsai’s team… isn’t it a repeat of the same mistake?

But now, we are choosing between Ma Ying-jeou and Tsai Ing-wen. Not Chen Shui-bian and Ma Ying-jeou. Ma’s team is also as problematic. Very indeed.

JiRo: Is there really no 92-consensus? How do you explain that economic benefits being brought about, then?

The people involved in the discussions then said from the start, that there wasn’t a 92 consensus. Ma’s people were the exact people who coined the term “92 consensus” in the first place. Economic relations between Taiwan and China were already robust long before any ‘consensus’ took place.

Is life better after 92-consensus?

Let’s talk about ECFA (Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement). Mainland Chinese governments came [to Taiwan] to make acquisitions.

JiRo: At least the Taiwanese corporations have China as their revenue hinterland?

I’m sorry, without 92-consensus, Taiwanese businesses would have set foot in China. The result of opening the economies allowed Taiwanese revenue to be sucked away. China says that without 92-consensus, there will not be ECFA.

JiRo: How so?

The result of ECFA is that many manufacturing, electronic and skill-intensive industries have relocated to China. Taiwan makes the orders, China does the production. Do you think the Taiwanese people’s employment will be unaffected?

You can look at Hong Kong residents. Their woes. Be it economic, people’s livelihood or politics. This is what Taiwanese are afraid of.

JiRo: Then, why can’t focus on skills upgrading and increasing productivity of people?

Because the Chinese government can afford to not honor her promises. To betray human rights.

JiRo: So, you mean that Ma is writing a blank cheque for China to fill in?

Yes. The polices Ma made 4 years ago. Not one were fulfilled. During his term, he said that his policies needed 8 years to take effect. What’s the difference between this and cheating?

JiRo: The 8 years coincides with the next election timing.

Ma said this 1 year ago. A president’s term is 4 years. After getting elected, then he mentions this. How do you feel about it?

JiRo: He should have said this before the election.

Yea!

JiRo: So you’re saying that the living standard of the lay Taiwanese citizens hasn’t improved much at all? What about what the HTC CEO (Wang Hsueh-Hong) said? (She stood up for Ma, saying that his polices have helped Taiwan)

The income disparity, unemployment, unpaid leaves, those things have been borne by the average citizen. The words that come out from a multi-millionaire CEO, someone at the top of society’s pyramid, has she gone out and seen the people?

Calligraphy, Couplets and Catchy Lines – Chinese Typography Part 3/3

Hi Guys, this is the final installation of the 3 parter series on Chinese design. I’d like to thank everyone for reading and for their very nice words of encouragement.

Tonight, I will go thru the remaining 2 cool stuff you can infuse into Chinese designs. They include using beautiful calligraphic elements in your design, and also using the couplet way to express your taglines to make it more catchy and memorable!

I. Calligraphy: Adding the ‘atas’ feel to your design.

Calligraphy is a very graceful way to express the language, and is used by plenty of artists through the ages. Infusing calligraphic elements into your design makes it look classy and elegant, and also more oriental.

The few elements in Calligraphic design are:

A. Water colored theme

There should be hints of a arrugat paper (or more commonly known as CRUMPLED PAPER), grainy, or washed out. The colors should look slightly worn, and hues of red, blue, or gray/black work awesome on a calligraphic design.

B. Calligraphic Fonts

Of course, the fonts play a huge role in making your calligraphic design authentic. While its hard to reproduce that same effect with handwritten precision using computer fonts, we have still get the effect somehow!

There’re many calligraphic fonts out there, but I will show two of my favourite, Qiti and XingKaiTi.

Now I’m know really little about calligraphy, so I can only give you very superficial observations about these two. Normally QiTi is more well used since it’s not as ‘bold’ and ‘heavy’ as XingKaiTi, making it look younger and less LKK. But as with caligraphic fonts, they look better VERTICAL than horizontal!

II. Culture and Catchy Phrases

This is more lingustic than design, so this will affect the wordings and taglines. Many ads have great english taglines. For instance, the famous dengue posters we see:-

Tagline is “IF THEY BREED, YOU WILL BLEED”

Most ad agencies that do the chinese version will say things like 如果伊蚊滋生，你會流血. Or something to that effect. Technically it’s correct translation, but in doing so it’s lost its original ‘crunchiness’. When coming up with Chinese taglines and phrases, it’s important to:

1. Be as succinct as possible. 

Remove and conjuntions like 和 的 因为 所以 because their do not add any meaning, but instead dilute the feel of the phrase.

2.Use a couplet of Phrases.

I find that most effective taglines in Chinese use a couplet (a pair) of either 4, 6, or 7 characters.

A. Four Character Couplet

This is by far the easiest to notice and remember, but hardest to formulate. Because you essentially only have 8 characters to play with, you gotta be very very careful about which word to use to express your intent. After coming up with it, don’t forget to say it out, and see if it sounds nice to the ear. And it should also make grammatical sense as well.

In the above, its VERB + NOUN, VERB + NOUN for the first one. For the bottom line, even though it isnt a clone in structure, it still flows because of a repetitive word, REN. And REN-REN is a NOUN, 有 is a verb, and 責 is a noun.

So, at as whole it reads as

VERB NOUN VERB NOUN, NOUN VERB NOUN.

B. Six Letter Couplets

The above is very simple, VERB + NOUN, VERB + NOUN.

Apart from the continuity that aids remembering, notice how the last two words of each line describes a state. In taglines, it important to put the most important info at the START and END. In this case, the middle one tends to lose focus, but it’s okay, since the gist of the message lies in the VERB at the front.

C. Seven Letter couplet.

This is mainly found in more jovial and happy occasions, since this structure of writing bares striking resemblance to chinese new year writings (Spring Couplets). The above one exploits, again, the repetition of a single letter to aid memory.

Note that the BLUE words and BLACK words are not explicitly linked together. You can just chip off the black wordings and the messgae will still be fine. But the last 3 characters add a dimension of tone and mentality (in this case, proactiveness and happiness) to the otherwise bland message.

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Okay! With this I conclude my Series on Chinese design! I hope that you have learnt something! And if you have any comments regarding what I’ve written (particularly if you disagree), do comment! I wanna learn as well.

Chinese design is uniquely different from English, and when people realise it, the way they do design will be entirely different. I hope that through this series you have gotten a clearer perspective of Chinese and how to take advantage of the medium to create awesome looking designs! Chinese will NOT be a liablity, but an ADVANTAGE to your design!

Jiayou, and all the best!

resolution for 2012

The first time I actually forgot to pen down my new year’s resolution. been inundated with work and other ‘work’ as well. but hey i’m here. this is public but will not be publicised, so its okay for me to be honest here.

what are my goals?

1. ACADEMIA

okay, i’ll be blunt here. i need ensure at least 4.5 by the end of the immediate sem (i tink). competition for taiwan in keen. i already know of more than 3 ppl who are bent on going there, and their gpa aren’t lower than 4.5 either. i’d better keep up. but then, at the end of the day, if after trying my best, i still cannot make it, i will be satisfied and still give God the Glory for a race well run.

2. PERSONAL

I hope to treat my friends better. I hope to be less of a bitch, and slower to anger. And I want to recognise the people who truly value me and value them back, instead trying so hard to mix with people who are honestly much closer within themselves. I think i’ve somehow found my place in school, in church and outside. but no matter the closeness, i promise i will be true as a person.

and in other news, i do hope to have someone special to spend my birthday with this year. and no i don’t mean my parents. of course i love them like hell, but you get my idea. i think we’ll see how God leads. i can’t say for sure, but i hope for the best.

3. SPIRITUAL

After doing design for church for more than a year now, I think I am slowly beginning to see how God can use design to minister to me. As I interact with people, God is teaching me humility, patience. God opens my eyes to the stories, people and pictures that show His power. And if you’ve been touched by God, I cannot not change.

In this year, I want to open my eyes big and wide to see His miracles and power unfold. I want to actively pursue God through design. I want to, for instance, try praying through every step of my design. I haven’t done that before. I wanna try it out and see if God will do something in my life.

 

3 cool stuff you CAN do with Chinese design / typography (but rarely English) – Chinese Typography Part 2/3

Hello there! I’m back with the 2nd part of the Chinese Typo series. Thanks to everyone who gave me their feedback, and I’m so glad you found these posts useful! Tonight I will show you 3 awesome things you can do with Chinese design. Some of them take advantage of the appearance of the Chinese characters, others leverage on the cultural and linguistic capabilities of the language. Enjoy!

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1. You can use Chinese vertically! (Vertical Alignment)

As stated before, Chinese characters are similar in shapes in that they’re blockish and appear as “monospaced” characters. This means that unlike English, you can also place them vertically, and they’ll still read fine! In fact, for short phrases, vertically aligned text can grab a lot more attention especially in Singapore since most headers / taglines are presented horizontally.

HOWEVER, do note the following technical stuffs.

• Chinese characters dom’t look very nice when the vertical space between them is large (left). And since most programmes still think the Chinese text is horizontal, you need to MANUALLY REDUCE the leading (or line-spacing).

• For this reason, DO NOT use the “Type Vertical Text” tool to type them. Instead, use the normal Type tool. Draw the text box out to a roughly determined width that you’d want your Chinese characters to look like. Then begin to type your characters. Each new character should then “spill out” of the narrow width, down onto the next line.

• A good lead will be the font size, or slightly smaller, depending on the spacial arrangement of the characters as well. For instance, the “一” is barely more than 1 thin line. So it’s best to shorten the vertical spacing between it and the next character below, so that it doesn’t look like 2 separate words, or detached.

2. You can modify each character to desired effect! (Character-specific modification)

For a word like “大人”, you can modify the ”人” to achieve the following:

Of course, you can do a mixture to achieve a composite of effects as well. Why is this special to Chinese. Just ask yourself if you can modify the word “ADULT” and keep a straight face on. Haha.

3. You can play around with Sounds! (Homonymic Customisation)

Mediacorp has been toying with this for ages now, but it’s still a fun thing to try out. Since Chinese language has plenty of homonymic words shou4 (受, 瘦, 壽), or pa2 (爬, 扒, 琶). You can simply sub-out one character to make it instantly more interesting!

In the above example, the word 受 is replaced by 瘦. It adds a sense of liveliness and humor to the catch phrase. The use of character customisation on 瘦 also makes it visually stand out. A very commonly used method in Chinese magazines and newspapers (especially tabloids).

Caution though. While at this, make sure you don’t change the intended meaning of the tagline! (It did in the above one). And avoid making cliche changes. Or it’ll look just as cheesy as Mediacorp variety show names.

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Okay that’s all for tonight! Thanks for reading!

In the last part of this series I will touch on the final 2 things you can do with Chinese design and typography. They include using the calligraphic and culture aspect of Chinese designs, and how Chinese can be used to formulate  effective taglines, perfect for marketing campaigns and advertisements.

Stay tuned!!

Beyond the Sim and the Sun — Chinese Typography Part 1/3

I’ve thought about this, and I’ve decided to give a 3-part series based on my knowledge and experience with Chinese design publications. I’m not an expert, definitely, but it’s my hope that you, the designer or the audience, will gain some insight and form some of your own as well. Chinese is a beautiful language, and it deserves to be standing proud on its own.

Most of you are familiar with these 2 fonts. They come standard in every computer, and hence, quite unfortunately, in almost every design as well.

P.S. The following fonts are shown in Traditional Chinese, but all have Simplified Versions. No worries!

There’s nothing wrong with these fonts; it’s just that they’ve been over used to the point that it looks very boring and repetitive. Unless you want your design to be one of the “rest”, try staying away from these fonts. But of course, it depends also on the PURPOSE of the font. If it’s for a body of text, it MAY (read: MAY) be okay to use them. Depending, but I still don’t recommend it. Because they’re much nicer alternatives out there.

1. Zongyi

This is a very commonly used font in popular entertainment magazines and shows, as the title might have already hinted to you. Zongyi font is perfect for taglines, titles, headers and quotes. It’s good for promotional purposes. But precisely so, you may wanna refrain from making your school report or assignment look too gimmicky.

2. Dahei

Think of Dahei as Helvetica Bold. It’s when you wanna emphasize stuff. Dahei is awesome for subheaders, bulleted points, bylines, short introductory text. But because this font has a thicker width, a body of Dahei text may prove too overbearing on the eye, so its not for large pages of text.

3. Zhunyuan

Zhunyuan is a less formal font due to its roundness and amicability. It’s really versatile; you can use it as a header, subheader, body text font — just about anything. I’d say Zhunyuan is the most useful font to have in your font library.

5. Youxian

Youxian, as its name suggests, is a very thin, light font. Like English light fonts, Youxian shines as a header (which has to be extra big to compensate for its thinness). When used correctly, Youxian exudes an air of exclusivity and class to your design. Good for fashion spreads and new-age designs. Do note that its legibility is not very high since the strokes are thin and are disconnected. So avoid using as body text.

Okay, that’s all for tonight. In the next part I will explain how to classify Chinese fonts and the design rules that usually work for Chinese fonts.

my take on chinese design 中文設計之感想

I can no longer stand the silence. I’ve always had a personal conviction that Chinese design in Singapore generally feels and looks like a 2nd class citizen. Most designs are primarily done in English, and then haphazardly translated into Chinese. Language can be roughly translated, but design isn’t like that. People cannot expect an English design to be merely lifted and converted into another language and STILL expect it to be as effective. Allow me to point out why.

English and Chinese are vastly different in their Written Forms.

Chinese characters are logograms (象形文字), which means they are written to LOOK like what they represent. And more than just that, ALL characters have a fixed width and height, and are BLOCKISH. Or what we call monospaced characters. There is no spacial separation (space) within words and sentences.

English characters, on the other hand, are totally different. They are variable in width. Just like in this blog entry, the letters ‘i’ and ‘m’ have different width. English letters stick together form a discernable word. An empty space tells you when a word ends / begins.

These differences between languages may seem small, but in design it’s enough to define two entirely different design philosophies already. In other words, Chinese design will have to be entirely rethought. Designers NEED to recognize that Chinese medium demands a entirely new approach to ensure the message is enhanced, not lost, to the very audiences they seek to speak to.

If I may, I would like to offer my word of advice to anyone who’s dabbling with Chinese design.

1. Give Chinese language the respect and coverage it deserves.

Don’t give your last ounce of design stamina to it. Don’t leave it to the last to do. If your tendency is to neglect it, them why not give it primary attention first. This way you can spare more time to thinking of how Chinese design works. It’s not difficult, it just requires you to care enough about the people who will see your design.

2. Please diversify your Chinese fonts.

I dare say that 80% of Chinese designs use only ONE FREAKING FONT. Simhei, or Simsun. I’m not sure if it’s due to laziness or lack of innovation, but they both behave like Arial. They both are so common they actually suck. Yucks! I will release a subsequent post JUST talking about Chinese font. So keep a look for them!

One thing about Chinese design is that, because of the uniformity of Chinese characters, you CAN (read: CAN) break the design rule by using 4 or 5 fonts! In a page! Yes!

Why so? Because even after the font is changed, the overall appearance is still the same. Simsun and Simhei, while being entirely different in themselves, look similar from a macro point of view. A design will greatly benefit from the having different fonts, the same way English design can benefit as well. Varied fonts can more accurately bring out the emotion of the design. Using a ‘standard’ font basically handicaps the aesthetic appeal of any design.

3. English design rules don’t apply in Chinese!

What are the common typography design rules? Leading, tracking, drop caps, font weight, presentation. Hierarchy. Are they such rules for Chinese design? Yes. But are they the same rules? NO!

For example:

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1. You can track a English word, but not Chinese! You need a certain horizontal space between characters for them to be legible! This means that when using software like Word or InDesign, you have to do the extra work to track the characters properly! Because these softwares do a very poor job in tracking.

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2. You can exploit the vertical writing ability of Chinese characters! Very few people will think of presenting Chinese vertically. Yet for short phrases and taglines, it’s immensely effective, simply because its the ONLY language that can be presenting vertically, with GRACE. Try it with English. It’s gross.

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I will post a another post JUST on Chinese typography. I think it’s so important to understand this. It’s been neglected for too long. It’s crucial to Chinese design! Hope that you’ve found this post beneficial to you!