Hangul Typography
한글 타이포그래피
The craft and design of setting Hangul into pages for printing and reading, from hand-set metal type and phototypesetting to digital fonts.
01About
For a long time Hangul, like Chinese characters, was written in vertical columns from top to bottom. Modern newspapers were printed from metal type, which compositors picked out letter by letter and set into pages; the Independent News, the Korean Provisional Government's paper founded in Shanghai in 1919, was hand-set and printed through the night by its staff far from home. From the 1970s horizontal Hangul entered print publishing, and phototypesetting and offset printing flourished; The Hankyoreh, founded in 1988, was the first Korean newspaper printed horizontally. In the 1980s and '90s design moved to graphics software and the internet, and designers today experiment between print and screen.
02In the gallery
Compare pages from different decades: is the text vertical or horizontal, and how do the letter spacing, line spacing, and margins change?
Wall label terms in Korean
- 납활자
- Metal type
- 사진식자
- Phototypesetting
- 세로쓰기/가로쓰기
- Vertical / horizontal setting
03Notes
Hangul type has moved from vertical to horizontal, and from hand-set metal to digital fonts.
When the same sentence is set differently, how do its pace and feel change as you read?