Chris Wu

Most trained designers and typographers are familiar with the ways to make roman letterforms look good, and have keen control over letterspacing, wordspacing, line breaks, line lengths, and typeface choices. But what do you do when you have to typeset a language that you don’t speak, read, or write? The character forms are alien to you, and you have only the default typefaces that come with InDesign. Which typefaces do you use, and how do you use them?

As Western business and cultural relationships with China grow, many in the West are having to typeset Chinese. This workshop introduces designers to typesetting Chinese, and includes an overview of Chinese typefaces that are available, current trends in type design and use, and basic principles of Chinese typography. Participants will hear about current practices, will typeset display type and text in Chinese, and will have their efforts analyzed in critiques.

Chris Cheng-Huan Wu will lead the workshop. Wu is an Associate at the New York design studio Project Projects, where his clients include BOZAR Brussels, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Field Operations, Guggenheim Museum, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, The Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of China, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, SALT (Istanbul), Vera List Center for Art & Politics, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. Wu has produced a number of bilingual projects in China in the past few years, including several exhibition catalogues: Downtown (James Cohan Gallery, Shanghai), Timelapse (National Art Museum of China and CentrePasquArt, Switzerland), and Verdensteatret: Telling Orchestra and Funeral Machine (Guangzhou Museum, China). Recently, he is leading a large scale, bilingual exhibition design project for M+ Museum in Hong Kong, titled Building M+: The Museum and Architecture Collection, which opens January 10 till February 9, 2014.

Wu was born and raised in Taiwan. He received his master degree in Communications Design at Pratt Institute and has worked in New York since 2007. Before coming to New York, he was an Associate Art Director at Ideata Advertising / TBWA Taiwan and worked for international clients including Adidas, Pernod-Ricard (Chivas Regal, Jameson, Martell, Glenlivet), and Nissan.

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