Zuyi Kang

Zuyi's main interest is the exploration of expressive typography and typographic re-interpretation applied to existing text from the perspective of the designer.

[email protected]

Background

Zuyi Kang graduated from Capital Normal University in China as a graphic design major and in September 2012 was accepted to Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London as a Visual Communication major. In 2013, after getting her Master's degree, she returned to China and was appointed Graphics Lecturer in the Inner Mongolia Normal University.
Zuyi Kang is passionate about graphic design, font design, and research on typographic design application in novel writing. In her studies at UAL, Zuyi discovered the hybrid novel and fell in love with it. In 2016, she returned to the UK to pursue a PhD at Cambridge School of Art under the supervision of Professor Will Hill and investigated how different typographic design elements can be applied in the hybrid novel.

Research interests

Most novels or stories are purely written texts. The typographic design of each page is similar and conventional, with few illustrations or images. However, some novels are entirely different - their typographic layout changes with the storyline. In such books, the content has been specially arranged using changes in font size, space between words and rows, color, alignment, case or special additional symbols; sometimes these changes make the sentences unreadable. In this way, the typographic layout creates the content of the story, illustrates the character’s emotions, and develops narrative rhythm. Moreover, the role of these typographic elements can change according to the literary narrative structure. This research discusses the potential for typographic design applications in novel writing from both the theoretical perspective and the practice-based research point of view, investigating how typographic design elements are applied in novel writing.

Recent presentations and conferences

Projects and exhibitions:
Installation design Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in Theorem, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, United Kingdom, July 2018

Installation design Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in From Space to Space exhibition, Beijing 798 Art Centre, China, December 2017

Invisible Cities, exhibited in MA Show Dot the I’s and Cross the t’s, Chelsea College of Arts, September 2012