“When thoughts can make money, spend time into thinking how to sustain. Don't be afraid to try and when things don't work out, good things is worth to wait.”
- Roy Chan
Roy is a traditional Chinese font designer. He found Moodmen Font for his font design and created Reborn font.
This is the introduction of Reborn font:
Roy prepared himself a design base and self branding for being designer, while studying Advertising Design. After graduation, he had an agency work as a normal graduate, but keep doing art font design on Instagram.
After finding interest in font design, he realized traditional Chinese font is very rare and had a dream of being a traditional Chinese font designer. Roy quit his job to focus on design, sold self-designed calendar products to have enough funds to switch to full-time traditional Chinese font designer.
Roy is now running his own studio, Moodmen Font, for his traditional Chinese font design. In 2021, Roy reboots the Reborn font project halted in 2019. Although font cannot make much money, he designed Reborn font to cheer up local people. The Reborn font is crowdfunding in WaBay, trying to visualize the 'soul of Hong Kong'.
Crowdfunding need to motivation. Font design could never make anyone a billionaire, but it could bring you satisfaction. When people actual paid for Reborn font, when over 200 people subscribed the trial, when people leaving thank you comments, these overwhelming responses bring sense of achievement and feel companioned on the road of protecting Traditional Chinese.
“The Cantonese speech by Roy Chan was interesting as it was my first confrontation with a traditional Chinese font designer. Seemingly non-profitable business idea, he managed to make it a business by considering various factors. #Passion Geographical and demographic consideration for desired product sales and the Venn diagram of passion, time and art was indeed more than enough to intrigue me into asking more questions about the business and the person. The compromise that has to be made is interpreted in such a way that different compromise creates differences that may be important in different circumstances. From this, I learned that compromise may not be taken as opportunity cost but as an opportunity.#integrity I used to take compromise as something reluctant, but now it is an opportunity.”
Juwon Lee - Student from ENTR3100
“I am amazed by Roy’s #grit and #passion for HK’s culture as I can see the Reborn font has integrated various nostalgic HK elements into every single Traditional Chinese character. While it is hard to make a living merely on doing art, I believe how Roy commercializes his originated typography into several products (and NFTs), e.g. stationery sets and calendars, would arouse the public attention and be able to sustain his creation. Here’s the shoutout to Roy: I am a big fan of Roy’s typography that solves one of my worries on my YouTube videos creation. I am a Cantonese-speaking YouTuber who put captions in Cantonese as well. It was hard to find suitable fonts with Canto words compatible for captions on my videos. Unfortunately, I missed his last preorder period (purchased to support his campaign this time!). Looking forward to receiving the font pack! Thanks for sharing your inspiring journey!”
Wing Hei Sham - Student from ENTR3100
Find out more about the visual record of this class on MIRO:
Read more on how student think after the session:
