Western Hansans

Recently I've been focusing on my personal portfolio development which has set a mountain of personal projects that have varied subject matters and points of interest which begins with the creation of Western Hansans typeface. The idea initially appeared to me through a book published by Phaidon titled 'Made in North Korea'. The book documents a large amount of printed materials from unknown designers under the roof of the DPRK. (Will review this book at a later date) Which made me speculate as to what my creative process would be if I lived in a soviet lead country.

Taken back by the focus of detail and control to consumer products and further more within this book was one point of interest but the major attraction of this book is the typography used and showcased. The traditional language of Han (Hangugeo in South Korea, Chosŏnmal in the North, soviet rip off of the Unified Korean alphabet). Which made me question if their was an online version available of the typeface to be used. Luckily yes! But in Hangugeo. The typeface does have a western counterpart which takes the traditional shapes and forms but not to the full extent of structure and specified use. It's available as a google free font. (Link at the bottom & shown in picture bellow).

The adaptation of Han and the western alphabetical system within Black Han Sans can be seen as minimal. A great functional typeface with a thick, bold post commie look but I think this could have been taken further. As seen within traditional Han there are a number of characteristics not only to this typeface but the language itself, every letter fits a perfect square from x to y height with varying spacing, stroke, stem, aperture but no descenders to not break the box structure. This in some cases is done so that the typeface can be perfectly read from top to bottom but most writing in Korea now is usually from left to right this creates the typeface to be perfectly aligned and centralised every time in use horizontally and vertically.

All these traits attracted to me but I felt the need to have the western version adapt either some or most of these specific traits of the Han version, such as the T sections, landscape S (what I call them), thick round and boxy O's and so on which this pilled on to the never ending 'to do list'.

This eventually took me about 2 days non stop of working to do the overall alphabet (thank god I didn't do lowercase or numerals). I might be up for the suggestion of creating the numerals within the same design restrictions but that will be at a later date. As for now all of these need to be coded and made into a functional typeface and will be up for free download if you wish to grab yourself a copy and see what you can do with it. Heres some promo pictures and alphabetical line up.