My new song/visual “589”, first foretaste of my coming album Mooncake Songs, is on Youtube! A stop signal of an old Shanghai bus inspired me during my first days in China back in 2002, still in the Jiang Zemin era long ago:

A short video on how I work on my new Chinese typeface is on Youtube:

My new song/visual “Ambivalentopia” is on Youtube:

I have been teaching multilingual typography and book design in the framework of the Editorial Design Master program at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences (FH Dortmund) under Prof. Sabine an Huef (Buchlabor) in the 2020/21 winter term. Now, I have switched to basic courses in typography and layout for 1st year students at Hildesheim University of Applied Science and Art (HAWK Hildesheim) Faculty of Design in support of Prof. Alessio Leonardi. The pandemic has turned me into a full-fledged Zoom potatoe, but experience is good, much better than I thought. And Erasmus+ teaching mobilities still work, as I was lucky to find out holding two online lectures on multilingual typography and Bauhaus at the Art Academy of Latvia (LMA) under Prof. Guntars Sietiņš.

Friends of typography and culture: Here is a new triptych on the Chinese type cosmos, edited and published by The Type (formerly Type Is Beautiful) in Shanghai. Get your copy here. I had the honor of contributing to this project.

My Chinese–Latin font AR Laowai Sung (文鼎老外宋) is available on Fontstand along with many other font families of the Arphic Design Collection. On Fontstand, you have three hours for free testing, then you can ‘rent’ the font for a month or longer and spend a fraction of the normal price. Apart from that, I strongly recommend Fontstand as an outstanding source for decent type matching in multilingual typography. If you are working on short-term projects, such as I did with the 2018 Executuve Summary of the World Inequality Report (Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi versions), Fontstand helps you make your favorite font selections affordable.

On January 14–15, 2020, I held two one-day classes and a talk at Münchberg Media Design Campus, Hof University of Applied Sciences, on multilingual typography. The students experimented with multilingual signage systems on the backdrop of the coming semester exhibition, including Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and German. I am always excited to contribute a spark of multilingual, trans-cultural design to existing projects.

Since 2018, I am a contributor to iconic Chinese typography forum Type is Beautiful, a group of type experts mainly located in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. Apart from their impressing online activities, they managed to write/translate and publish books, co-conduct seminars and events both in Asia and Europe and even produce type merchandise. The first result of our collaboration is part one of an article on the theory of transcultural type design and typography—aethestic, conceptual, and methodological approaches (original title: 《一次关于跨文化文字设计的讨论（一）：审美、理念与思路》). The article is published in Chinese, however please note that an English version is under preparation and to follow soon.

From October 2018 until September 2019, I am a substitute professor of typography at Braunschweig University of Art (HBK). It feels truly great to have this opportunity. I am preparing a detailed record of these two semesters.

Glad to annouce I will once more be an ATypI speaker this year in Antwerp. My topic is Plantijn’s Biblia Polyglotta and Belgium from the perspective of multilingual typography. The talk will be held on Friday, September 14, 11:20, at Arenberg Theater. I can’t wait to be around and meet all those typeheads again. For those unable to come, I am sure videos of all presentations will be provided after the event.

My typeface “Hong Kong Street Face”, the Chinese name being “香港馬路體” or “港街黑”, has now been released by 3type, a typical and atypical type foundry based in Shanghai, who offer a type-on-demand licensing model. Chinese font development being a very long and complex process, this practice eases the commercial aspects of a foundry, and helps at meking the fonts be used whereever needed.

My first large-scale font family, 946 Latin, a techno-style constructed sans-serif with 75 weights (a variation font soon to follow), is now available on Fontspring.

Life goes on! A one-day workshop on Latin-CJK typeface design is held at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, class of type design (Prof. Stephan Müller) on January 23, 2018. A five-day multilingual lettering workshop is held at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Klaipeda Faculty, Lithuania, from March 12 to 16, 2018. The workshop is conducted by the CIRRUS Nordic-Baltic Network of Art and Design Education.

Yasemin Fakili and I wrote an article on cultural aspects of multilingual typography for fount magazine issue 2 – connect. You can order a copy at the fount shop.

Under the motto “From Digit to Digital (从「指尖」到「数位」)”, the first ever Type School organized by Shanghai-based foundry 3type (三言) will take place in Shanghai from July 8 to 22, 2017. I am both delighted and proud of being part of the teaching team alongside Susanne Zippel, Georg Seifert, Zheng Chuyang (鄭初陽), Mira Ying (應寧) from Type is Beautiful, and many others.

Hermann Schmidt Verlag, Mainz, recently published the 2017 version of legendary Typodarium, a tear-off calendar with a daily dose of fresh type specimen. You propably wouldn’t want to tear off these beautiful pages, though. This year, Typodarium was opened for Non-Latin entries, which is good news to me. It was an honor to be asked to submit three pages – April 7 (Frust, a new sans serif development), August 28 (Hong Kong Street Face 港街黑), and October 14 (AR Laowai Sung 文鼎老外宋). Better order your copy soon!