Emotions of Simplified and Traditional Chinese Typeface

Abstract

Chinese typeface is widely used in design works that have numbers of users. The majority of Chinese words today consist of two or more characters. Basically, the simplified forms of Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia. The corresponding traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. This study quantifies the relationships between emotions and Chinese typefaces by the process of kansei engineering. 20 simplified types and 20 traditional types were extracted and the kansei evaluation experiment was conducted for the people in mainland China and Taiwan where are the main regions using Chinese. The results of cluster analysis, factor analysis, and dual scaling analysis are used for comparison of affective differences between mainland China and Taiwan. Particularly, it is found that for the widely used types Heiti, Songti, and Kaiti, the people in mainland China and Taiwan have opposite feelings of classic and contemporary.