Original link: https://blog.yitianshijie.net/2022/10/15/vernacular-typography/
Received the trial issue of Atelier Anchor’s visual culture magazine “dash” , which contained Chen Zihao’s “Walking Horses to Read the Words: Local Street Scene Texts in Malaysia”. The original text was written in English, and the translator Li Chen talked about the concept of “Vernacular Typography” in the preface:
“Local Street View Text” may not be the best translation. Vernacular Typography discussed in this article actually refers to font styles created or applied by practitioners who have no professional design training – not using pre-made font files on the computer, or creating them in an academic way of highly professional text typography. Vernacular Typography is daily, here and now, in the market, in small businesses, in the rivers and lakes, and in local morale. We try to translate vernacular with words such as “down-to-earth”, “local”, “everyday”, “local”, and “popular”, and also choose “font design”, “wenyu typesetting”, “city signs”, “street view text”, “character scene”, etc. The words closest to the meaning of Typography are considered in the text, but neither combination seems to be enough to faithfully explain the original text. After several rounds of communication with the original author, we chose the existing translation method – local Street View text.
I guess it can be translated as “amateur text design”. The term amateur needs to be rehabilitated.
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