How to design Chinese character signs

Logo creativity in the form of characters as symbols is an important part of logo design and a new direction of logo design in recent years, which has strong artistic expression and visual appeal. As a visual symbol of information media, Chinese characters contain specific modeling concepts. People convey information with the help of the unique meaning of words, and through the knowledge and understanding of forms, they transform them into "sound" and "meaning" outside the form, thus generating communication and understanding the true connotation of information transmission. Characters, including Chinese characters, letters and numbers, have always been loved by the audience because of their strong cognition and straightforward information. This paper mainly talks about the concrete application of Chinese characters in logo design. First, the basis and premise of Chinese character logo design. The history of Chinese characters is almost synchronized with the history of mankind, and its birth is also one of the important signs of the beginning of human civilization. Being in the Chinese language system, our daily work and life are inseparable from Chinese and Chinese characters. Chinese characters are an important carrier of information transmission and a symbol of oriental culture, especially the symbolic representative of China culture. After thousands of years of development and evolution, Chinese characters not only enable social culture to be inherited and accumulated, but also the fonts themselves are changing, with profound cultural connotations and unusual artistic charm. Chinese characters have six configuration characteristics in origin: pictographic, comprehending, pointing, transferring notes and using supports. For example, pictograms are abstract expressions after analyzing something. Humans are often used to using pictures to visually reproduce the image of objective things and directly express or explain the situation of things. Through careful observation, our ancestors abstracted the most essential and representative parts of things and created hieroglyphics, which made it easy for people to understand what pictures represented. However, knowing that two or more Chinese characters are combined into meaningful words, one of which is the same, and the other is written differently, such as "Bao" and "Gun", while the word "Bao" is the same but uses different radicals, then the meaning of the words will be very different, that is to say, in addition to the literal content, the words also have spiritual connotations, such as association. As far as form is concerned, the process of character evolution is also the process of character design. From the beginning, Chinese characters have an image foundation and a highly generalized logo. When acquiring knowledge and information through words in a complex society, it is by no means the first to realize "meaning", but the first to rely on the visual "shape" of words. The shape of Chinese characters is also an abstract symbol, a static language, and a pattern that has evolved through development. Chinese characters have experienced thousands of years of evolution, gradually from pictograph to symbol, from simple to complex. From complexity to simplification and standardization, after a long period of tempering, simplification, synthesis and generalization, seal script, official script, cursive script and regular script have developed continuously, forming a unique expression and expression carrier. Thousands of Chinese characters have different meanings, different forms and different aesthetic feelings. Although ancient Oracle Bone Inscriptions is far from the present writing, the writing structure still conforms to the principle of pattern aesthetics. Taking Chinese characters as the matrix, we can design distinctive trademark signs. If we combine the forms of line, grass, official script, seal script and regular script in traditional calligraphy, and use modern design techniques, we can make the logo have strong national characteristics. Seal cutting is also an art of writing design with a long history in China. Great changes have taken place in the application of calligraphy, the conception of printing, the handling of styles and the mastery of knife techniques, which have created rich languages and diverse techniques for the design of writing signs. Chinese characters are based on graphics and hieroglyphics, and then developed into a trinity of sound, form and meaning. It has the advantages of summarizing, refining ideas and aesthetics in graphics and ideography, and has become a very effective design element, which is consistent with the victory of the logo in modeling and connotation. All these provide good conditions and ways for China font logo design and national style of logo creation, and are inexhaustible wealth for designers. Second, the design methods and ways of Chinese character logos Generally speaking, there are many strict and standardized artistic words (decorative words) in the trademarks and logos of Chinese characters, many of which use traditional seal cutting and calligraphy. 1. Decorative characters are decorated and changed on the basis of the basic glyphs of Chinese characters (such as bold and song style). Its characteristic is to get rid of the constraints of the font style and strokes to a certain extent, and transform the font structure into graphic images or add other images to indicate the theme. It often reconstructs glyphs with rich imagination, and uses exaggeration, increasing or decreasing stroke images, variant decoration and other methods to reflect the beauty of form, brushwork, structure and artistic conception through the stippling and glyph structure of characters themselves. In the visual recognition system, decorative fonts have the advantages of beautiful appearance, easy reading and recognition, and wide application range. The strokes of decorative fonts also have strong emotional colors. For example, fonts composed of thin lines are easily associated with perfume, cosmetics and other products, and thick and smooth fonts are often used to represent food, drinks, washing products and so on. The boldness of fonts and strokes is often used to show the strength of enterprises; And angular fonts are easy to show corporate personality and so on. Carefully designed fonts are different from ordinary printed fonts in appearance, and more importantly, they are designed according to the personality of enterprises or brands. They have made meticulous and rigorous plans for the shape and thickness of strokes, the connection between words, the unified modeling and other aspects, which are more beautiful and distinctive than ordinary fonts. In the process of implementing corporate image strategy, many enterprises and brand names tend to be similar, and the font logo design of unified enterprise names and logos has formed a new trend. The name and logo of the enterprise are unified. Although there is only one design element, it has two functions to achieve the effect of conveying information synchronously by vision and hearing. The logo designed by Mr. Wang for 1992 international auction originated from the font image of "Pai", which is a standard Song typeface. The ingenuity of creativity lies in the replacement of strokes, replacing the top of the word "white" with a small hammer with the most auction industry characteristics, and fixing a hammer to indicate the transaction, which vividly shows the auction site, and makes people feel comfortable. The emblem of Beijing National Musical Instrument Factory, designed by Yu Xiansheng in high school, is a combination of the Chinese character "Le" and the modeling of gongs and drums. The symbol expresses its meaning in words, which makes people feel like they are in the ocean of folk music, and fully summarizes the operating characteristics of the musical instrument factory. 2. Calligraphy symbols The design forms of calligraphy characters can be divided into two types. One is to directly use traditional calligraphy fonts or celebrity inscriptions, and the other is to highlight visual personality and pursue some implication of traditional calligraphy, which is specially designed based on calligraphy skills. Calligraphy characters (including seal cutting) are relative to standard printing fonts. Calligraphy has a history of more than 3,000 years in China. It has developed into a colorful calligraphy art, which can be appreciated and cultivated. It is also rich in content. In terms of fonts, calligraphy styles are different, and original works, cursive script, official seal, Han bamboo slips and Wei Bei have their own aesthetic significance and formal structure. Seal script is vigorous and dignified. The official script is straight, simple and elegant; Regular script is steady and dignified; The cursive script is concise and coherent, and the pen flies in the sky; Running script is unrestrained and graceful. Calligraphers of past dynasties and their creative activities endowed Chinese characters with rich connotations and presented colorful artistic styles. It not only shows the beauty of stippling structure, but also reflects the beauty of calligrapher's cultivation and artistic conception. It has incomparable advantages in the writing of any other nation in the world. Absorbing the achievements of calligraphy art can enrich the content of fonts and improve the artistic effect of fonts themselves. Chen Shaohua's "emblem of the Olympic bid" also uses the brushwork effect of perceptual freedom in expression. The use of calligraphy fonts for design has a specific visual impact, and the picture is novel, vivid and varied. However, calligraphy fonts will also bring some difficulties to the design of visual system, such as whether it is coordinated with other patterns when the system is integrated, whether it is easy to identify quickly and so on. The emblem of the 2008 Olympic Games "Chinese Seal Dancing Beijing" is conceived as "Beijing", which combines the traditional seal of China and sports features. After artistic exaggeration and deformation, it is skillfully transformed into a human figure running forward and dancing to meet victory, which vividly shows the enthusiasm and sincerity of Beijing to welcome guests from all directions with open arms, while the image of people is similar to the charm of "Beijing" and contains a strong charm of China. Seal appeared in China as early as four or five thousand years ago, and it is still a widely used form of social integrity, which means that Beijing will realize its solemn promise of hosting the best Olympic Games in history. Border processing adopts the method of missing edges and special-shaped seal cutting, which makes the overall appearance full, simple and heavy. "Beijing" and "2008" adopt the style of China bamboo slips, which are natural, concise and fluent, and are integrated with the emblem and the Olympic rings. The emblem of the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games is "Heaven, Earth and People". The graphic part of the emblem shows the twists and turns of the Chinese character "Zhi" with calligraphy strokes, which means that it has finally achieved its goal and achieved success through ups and downs. At the same time, the figure not only looks like a gymnast jumping forward, but also looks like an athlete riding on a pommel horse spinning in the air, which embodies the concept of sports. China's writing, calligraphy and the spirit of the Paralympic Games are integrated, which embodies the traditional culture of China and the spirit of the modern Olympic Movement, and has a profound traditional cultural heritage of China. The emblem of the Paralympic Games "Heaven and Earth Man" uses Chinese characters as the emblem pattern, and the emblem of the Olympic Games "China Seal Dancing Beijing" uses seals as the emblem pattern. "Chinese characters" and "Chinese seals" are the most typical elements in China's traditional culture, which are rich in China's cultural characteristics and echo each other in thought and artistic style. Logo is the language of vision, which uses visual images to express ideas. The use of Chinese characters for logo design is limited by its own word-making characteristics, and its morphological modeling is much more difficult than that of Latin letters. Latin letters have fewer strokes and simple structure, which conforms to the law of visual simplification; However, the strokes of Chinese characters are different in thousands, so it is difficult to integrate with graphics, and the structure is complex, the shape is too square and rigorous, and it is difficult to play freely in art and the plasticity is poor. The key to design lies in the word "Qiao", which is sometimes even impossible to meet. "What can be met but not sought" is a principle of design, that is, from conception to form, we should proceed from objective conditions, behave naturally and reasonably, and avoid being far-fetched. Ingenuity comes from the designer's exploration of potential objective conditions and reasonable skill application. The design idea of "what can be met but not sought" is by no means in a passive position, but respects objective conditions in order to achieve the perfect unity of subjective and objective in artistic content (meaning) and form (form), which is also a universal law in artistic creation. When designing, we should emphasize the whole, omit the details, start with the basic strokes and inject graphic factors. The font shape should be clever, and the image should be beautiful, pleasing to the eye and enjoying beauty. The expression method should be novel, unique, reasonable and appropriate, and the strokes should not be forcibly changed or even distorted to adapt to a specific form. It should be clever, natural, easy to identify, easy to read and not cause misunderstanding, which is more conducive to information dissemination and plays a role in identifying symbols. Due to the functional needs of logo design, the selected characters should also have strong representativeness and unique personality, and the connotation should be rich to strengthen the spiritual meaning of the characters, because the brand name is sometimes confused with other prefixes in its prefix, which affects its visual recognition. Chinese characters have a long history, which is itself a beautiful graphic form with a strong sense of symbols and high artistic modeling value. Mr. Lu Xun once said that China's writing has three beauties: beauty in meaning and beauty in emotion; The voice sounds beautiful; Formal beauty is feeling the eyes. Signs designed with Chinese characters have the characteristics of simplicity, beauty of meaning and rich structure, so that people can directly understand their symbolic meaning through themselves. With the development of China's design circles to China's national culture, many successful Chinese character logo designs have been produced, which have carried forward the essence of oriental culture and embodied the unique thoughts and wisdom of China people. It is an important task entrusted to us by the times and the nation to lead the trend of the times with our unique visual thinking mode and create our own unique design art.