Dynafont Art Fonts: LangMan Feng font

#Visual fonts

Let's dance you and I!
The romance of free love spreads across the city.
In the street and on the road, there are modern girls
in dresses and umbrellas everywhere.
Dotted, floral, lace…each reflects their personality
As self-confident as the atmosphere of the times.

The Romantic Series with a strong vintage flavor is the main character of this font story. Its gorgeous decorations recall us to the glorious past. Let us follow the pace of fonts to recall to the old-schooled literary youth!

A time of fashion and romance

It was a modern time between the Taisho period (1912-1926) and the early Showa period (1926-1989) when department stores, cinemas, ballrooms, and Western restaurants were thriving. In those days, the so-called moga (modern girls) and mobo (modern boys) wore Western clothes and ate Western foods, and the olden formalities and rules were old-schooled to them. An unarranged romance was then the most fashionable way of loving and being love.

Westernization started in the Meiji period has radically changed Japanese society in the 1920-30s. Traditional townhouses disappeared down the streets of Tokyo, and modern urban buildings, public space, and orderly planned transport systems arose. While shopping, going to movies, and having coffee on weekends became the most fashionable entertainments, listening to pop songs and reading magazines were the favorite pastimes. To become modern was the most fashionable trend in the city, and modernization of society began to take place in Japan.

Attractive Decorative Scripts

A wide variety of public entertainments gave rise to various emerging industries. For example, in addition to the “yen-pon” (literally one-yen book), a series of selected literary works sold at ¥1 each, magazines were another favorite of the publishing industry. Had we the opportunity to travel back to those days across times, we would have been surprised by the wide variety of books sold by bookstores in that time, which would never be second to the bookstores nowadays!

The magazine corner was particularly attractive. There were magazines for children, geisha photo albums for men, and fashion guide for modern girls and young wives. While appearance design became an ideal solution to quickly attract readers in the highly competitive reading market, decorative hand-written titles arose by leaps and bounds.

The Romantic Series – Reprinting Romance

The Romantic Series was inspired by the publications in the Taisho and Showa periods. From the tarnished, mottled magazines, designers still feel the aftertaste of the handwritten fonts in that time. Therefore, by developing a set of vintage fonts, we hope to reproduce the generally accepted esthetic experience by the public in that time for people nowadays to feel the beauty of “Romance in Taisho Period and Modernity in Showa Era”.

Stroke by stroke for LangMan Feng font

LangMan Feng font is inspired by the title characters of Film Review (1927). After figuring out the styles of these few characters, designers have developed the “LangMan Feng” font. In a wry smile, designers said it was not easy to design a font product with thousands of characters from just a few characters, and the process was like playing blocks. The leaf-shaped strokes were where challenges lie. It needed to find absolute balance among strokes character by character, and there was not shortcut whatsoever.

Usage

Each set of the Romantic Series is characterized by its decorative appearance. The series is fit for the titles and subtitles of newspapers, magazines, and publicity materials or the titles of CD covers, LP covers, and posters.

Features of LangMan Feng font

The “LangMan Feng” is the less complicated among all three sets in the Romantic series. It features a flat appearance, thin horizontal strokes, and thick vertical strokes, looking elegant, delicate, and solid. By decorating leave-shaped strokes with dots and geometric patterns, designers aim to bring changes and mobility to the font. Identical strokes are presented smoothly with a hierarchical effect, and characters with “口” as the radical are presented in different ways where applicable. The “LangMan Feng” can be considered as a steady font for design featuring a strong sense of curve and rhythm in the details.

Examples of the features of LangMan Feng:

Designer Insights

★ The Romantic Series is fit for use on titles, what are the differences from designing fonts for use in the body?
Designer: “Legibility” is the prime concern of body fonts. Readers must be able to get the message expressed by the text without spending extra time on identifying the characters. For example, Ming script is very common in text. The triangular head design on the font’s right hand side links characters on the right for readers to naturally read from left to right. By contrast, “legibility” is less concerned with title fonts such as the Romantic Series, which emphasizes the purpose of design for designers to spend more time and energy on the complexity and feature of stroke design.

DF LangMan Feng font introduced in this article is available for annual licensing DynaFont Treasure.

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