The Relationship Between Simplified Chinese Character Height and Cognition Research in Signage Design

Abstract

75% of our external information comes from vision, in signage and wayfinding system, characters and graphics have become the most important factor of information cognition. As the main characters in China's signage and wayfinding system, simplified Chinese characters affect the rapid and accurate cognition of information. At present, most of the cognitive research on simplified Chinese characters are learned from the data of Japan and Taiwan. Compared with Latin alphabets, Japanese and Chinese characters are much similar, but there are still significant differences between them. Japanese is a combination of Chinese characters and Kanas, the fonts and the layout of characters are very different. The traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan are much more complicated than the simplified ones used in mainland China. In order to obtain the data that can really guide the standards of signage design in China, this research carried out a series of experimental studies on simplified Chinese characters’ recognition. Under the condition of fixed font, font weight, color, similar stroke number and character frequency range, the experiment obtained the data of characters’ height and recognition distance by changing characters’ height and recording the corresponding visual recognition reaction time. Then, based on the method of regression analysis, the relationship between the two variables of character height and recognition distance is calculated and visualized. Through indoor simulation and supplementary experiments, the data and conclusions could guide or verify the existing ergonomics data and signage design standard. The research outcome shows the relationship between simplified Chinese character height and cognition distance of on public signage system, which provides a theoretical basis for the related research and design. The results also revealed that with the use of Sans Serif typeface，the minimum of character height in the current design standard can be further increased. This research is still in early stage, in addition to the character height, the influence of stroke number, thickness and background colour contrast of characters still need to be further studied.