Founder Type releases its 'Brother Chalk' font

Cui Xianren once earned his living by writing Chinese calligraphy in chalk on the street.| Li Ziheng/Xinhua

Domestic font developer Founder Type recently unveiled a new font designed by Cui Xianren, a renowned street artist whose hands were badly burnt in a fire.

According to a contract signed by the two sides in 2011, Cui will have the copyright over the font for the next 50 years.

With more than 400 days of development, the font is the nation's first one created by and named after a street artist.

At the unveiling ceremony on April 23 in Beijing, Cui received 15,000 yuan ($2,400) in presale income.

The 51-year-old calligrapher was born in Suihua city, Heilongjiang province, and was badly injured in an explosion that happened some 20 years ago while he was trying to gas up his three-wheeled motorcycle with a bucket of diesel.

After that accident, he was incapable of doing manual labor because his fingers on both hands were disabled, and only the first and third fingers could move slightly.

To earn his living, he began to practice calligraphy with chalk. Years later, he started to perform writing traditional Chinese characters in the streets.

He attracted much public attention in 2011 after some photos of him and his street art in Yantai, Shandong province, were posted and reposted on the Internet. He was dubbed "Brother Chalk" by many people who saw the photos and learned of his story.

Founder Type was among those who recognized Cui's talent, and they decided to digitize the characters he created as a new font.

Before the font was officially unveiled, it was pre-sold on Taobao, China's largest online shopping portal, and the Xiaomi app store for Android smartphones for a price of only 2 yuan. There were nearly 7,000 deals on the two platforms in a week.

The unveiling of the font means "more than just simply launching a new product", said Founder Electronics President Yang Bin. "It represents many additional sides, including people's support for Brother Chalk and the font development business."

Better environment

Also, at the unveiling ceremony, Zhang Jianguo, general manager of Founder Type, announced that the company "has turned many years of losses into a profit", thanks to the improvement of the copyright environment in China.

Today the largest font developer in the nation, Founder Type suffered a great deficit some 15 years ago as a division of Founder Electronics because of the poor copyright environment at that time.

"Many people just could not understand why they must pay to use Chinese characters since they have been used for thousands of years," Zhang told Beijing Business Today.

"They did not realize that the fonts and characters are different things, and fonts have copyrights."

When the company unveiled the Xu Jinglei font in 2007 based on the handwriting of the namesake actress, only around 200 genuine copies were sold.

In 2008, the company attempted to develop an innovative authorization model that offered different product packages with different fees for individuals and companies.

Some commonly used fonts can be downloaded and used for free, but some more sophisticated fonts require up to 4,500 yuan to use for a year, which is "definitely affordable for a company", said Zhang.

Nobody paid for a font before 2008, but now Founder Type has more than 600 corporate clients, according to the general manager.