Hui Jing Chen

Most of us regularly read web development articles or watch videos that talk about the latest web features, or techniques for implementing all the things and so on. I don't know about you, after almost 3 decades of existence, I realised I'm more of a learn-by-doing kind of person. Building little components from scratch is a great way to cement your knowledge of CSS properties and try out all those cool things you've read or heard about. You never know when it might come in handy...

When we talk about typography, the most common associations are print and Latin-based letters. Many associate printing with Gutenberg's printing press, but the first moveable type was invented by Bi Sheng in China approximately 400 years earlier. And today, even though print has yet to fall out of favour, the explosion of the web has resulted in a lot of reading being done off screens of all sizes. Analog typesetting is done with metal slugs, but the web uses CSS to set type. Modern CSS gives us the ability to set type for a dynamic medium, which is something relatively new, and requires us to look at typography with a fresh perspective. Chinese typography traversed its own parallel path of evolution over the centuries and this talk will cover the use of CSS as the typesetting tool of the web for both Chinese and Latin-based languages.

The very first website was launched on 6 Aug 1991, and today there are more than one billion websites in existence. Nearly all of them are laid out from top-to-bottom, left-to-right. But Chinese can also be written vertically. Chinese typography has evolved differently from Latin-based languages and we'll be covering the basics of Chinese characters, fonts and typography and how to translate all that to the web with CSS. And even if you don't use Chinese, the ability to build vertical layouts opens up a myriad of options for creative and interesting designs.