Why the Chinese Web looks monotonous.

After learning Chinese for nearly a decade and navigating the Chinese web for nearly equally as long, I began wondering why the Chinese internet looks so uniform. For instance, why do all chinese apps and websites use the same fonts ? Wouldn’t it be more interesting if some fun fonts were sprinkled here and there once in a while ? All these questions were answered once I started learning web development and realized how much space typefaces take. Where their western counterparts take up about a few hundred kilobytes, Chinese fonts usually take 7 to 12 megabytes. While this size doesn't really seem like a lot at first glance (it's only the size of one or two high quality songs!), it will cause the website using such a font to take a few more seconds to load. The problem with this is that reports have shown that more than 50 % of users leave sites that take over 3 seconds to load. So time is of the essence !

This is why Chinese websites generally rely on the end user’s default font settings instead of uploading fonts of their own. In the recent years however, some companies, such as Youziku (http://youziku.com/), have developed software capable of reducing file sizes by taking out any characters that are not currently used on a website. These technologies remain experimental however and default fonts are still preferred. One solution Chinese developers have found is to use images, gifs or svgs to store any interesting typography they would like to showcase on their website.

Below are some popular font types used on and outside of the web:

Songti - The Chinese equivalent of a Serif font. Originating from the Sond dynasty, it was made for woodblock printing and is still widely used. It was a default input font as far as Windows 7.

Heiti - The equivalent of a sans-serif font. Its origin has been disputed but it was used in the press in the early 1900’s. This font is widely used on the internet and usually the default font of Chinese mobile phones.

Caoti - Or Caoshu, is a cursive script, derived of the Kaiti script among others. It was developed during the Han dynasty and is characterized by fluid lines reducing the number of strokes in each character. Harder to read and master than other scripts.

Kaiti - Also referred to as Regular Script. Widely used in printed publications and official documents, also the first script teached to students when they learn calligraphy.

I do believe that with future technologies, it will be one day possible to see a much more diverse Chinese web landscape and developers won't have to rely on one unique default font to design their web interfaces.

Built With

• chinese
• typography
• web