As a boy, Gary Yau would cruise around Hong Kong in the back seat of his parents’ car. What caught his eye was not a toy shop or playground, but road signs. After he got home, the four-year-old would sketch the road plans from memory, with precise detail.
“I wasn’t aware that I was a road enthusiast at that time, but now, I discover that I’ve been a buff all along,” said the 25-year-old.
Next month, he and his team plan to launch a digital font based on the one used for Hong Kong’s old road signs, which were handmade by prison inmates. Their Prison Gothic font is the result of six years of painstaking work to maintain part of the city’s history.
“This is a way to preserve Hong Kong’s visual cultural memory,” Yau explained.
Gary Yau drew detailed maps of roads when he was four. Photo: Handout
Young geek on the road
Yau recalled that he even learned to write some Chinese characters by copying them from road signs.
“My teacher circled one of my Chinese characters and said it was wrong. That was when I knew I’d been following the style of what Chinese characters look like on road signs,” he said, adding that characters on the city’s older signs had straighter strokes that were easier for inmates to assemble.
When he entered university, Yau started a social media page, Road Research Society, to share interesting facts about roads and city planning. His first post was about the English font on Hong Kong’s road signs. Called Transport, the font from the United Kingdom is known for being easy to read.
“That post surprisingly received many likes and shares, so it got me thinking about expanding my audience,” the aficionado said.
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Tracing Hong Kong history
Whenever the university student returned to the city from his school in Australia, he took photos of traditional road signs and traced them on a computer.
In 2016, the enthusiast put together 50 Chinese characters from the signs he had outlined and uploaded the image to his personal Facebook account.
One of his friends suggested he create a font from it. Intrigued, Yau realised this would be a way to preserve one of his favourite aspects of Hong Kong’s past.
Before 1997, most characters and symbols on the city’s signs were hand-drawn, carved out and assembled by prison inmates. But as design technology has improved, these older signs are slowly being replaced.
In 2016, when Yau started the Prison Gothic project, the city still had more than 600 of these older road signs. Now, only about 500 remain.
“You never know when they’ll be taken down, so we tried to record it as soon as we could,” he said, sharing how he and six other enthusiasts went around town to document these imperfect but distinct characters.
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“I had no knowledge of making a font ... but I felt ambitious about making this happen,” Yau stated.
After the team visited the city’s existing traditional road signs, they had outlined about 500 characters.
But that is not nearly enough for a functioning font.
“For someone who uses Chinese daily, they need around 7,000 Chinese characters,” Yau stressed.
New expressions from existing parts
Since the team had exhausted the city’s traditional road signs, they had to make more characters by mixing and matching their indexing components and resizing strokes and radicals.
For example, they could not find the Chinese character for “prison” on any existing signs, so they built the one for their font from scratch.
This process involves a lot of trial and error. And after six years of meticulous work, what kept Yau going was the support from his followers.
“They’ve waited for this for as long as I’ve been doing this,” he said. “One of my supporters said that he waited for this font since he was in Form One. Now, he is in Form Six, and it’s finally here.”
After finishing most of the characters in April, Yau felt ready to introduce the font to the public. He launched a crowdfunding campaign in July. In 45 days, 1,306 backers contributed HK$1.34 million (US$170,699) to the project – an amount far more than he had ever imagined.
“It is so unexpected ... I can see the amount of passion and support,” said Yau of his brainchild.
Prison Gothic’s medium typeface is set to launch in November with 8,000 characters, and Yau is planning to develop a light version with the crowdfunded money.
He is excited to see how his supporters will make use of the digital font.
“I cannot own a road sign, but what I can do is digitise it,” Yau said. “I did not want to just archive it but develop it into something we can use in daily life.”
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