Creating a Chinese Firewatch logo
Love the logo? Buy the shirt here!
I first considered a Chinese localized name for Firewatch when I gave a talk at GDC China 2015, and they had translated the session title as <看火人> (word for word, this is “Watch Fire Man”). I grew up in Hong Kong reading Chinese, and I thought the localized name was well chosen—because while it mostly suggests “fire lookout” (which doesn’t specifically imply “firefighting”), it also allows a more ominous interpretation of “person watching the fire burn.”
This was long before we had ever decided Firewatch would have a simplified Chinese localization, but the name stuck with me.
Jump to 2017. When we began working with Tencent on a localized Chinese voiceover, it was natural for us to suggest <看火人> as the official localized title. We began to play around with the idea of having a properly thought-out Chinese logo to go with the localized title.
Chinese typography presents fascinating and challenging problems; here’s a great article about the breadth and complexity of the art form. Luckily, we are only attempting to create 3 relatively simple glyphs, all three of which are the same in both simplified and traditional Chinese, so we decided to try to do it ourselves rather than outsourcing it.
For reference, Jake, Claire, and I picked out three existing Chinese fonts that we thought were closest to the feel of Verlag, our English font. Claire, who doesn’t read Chinese, made a pretty great first attempt, seen in the lower right above. I’ve never had to think about Chinese characters as a design, but as someone who can read the language, I knew it didn’t “feel” very finished.
It was fun and educational for me, as someone with elementary Chinese penmanship, to sit down and try to analyze and articulate why some of the glyphs looked like “a kid wrote it.” It was also a fun exercise for me to give Claire, our art director, some direction notes for a change!
Further revisions include:
making the middle “Fire” character symmetrical
making sure all three glyphs take up about equal amount of space
The characters look great now! Then the attention went to how to resolve some of the harsh points in the graphic, in terms of just the visual design:
adjusting the gutter width so they are not identical (yellow)
making the cut in the shield shape more pleasing (red)
deciding whether the “Watch” glyph should have “feet” flourishes (green)
By the end of the third day, we’d settled on a design we’re very proud of. Here is Claire’s fantastic final vector version of the logo. We hope you like how it looks on a shirt as much as we do!
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