They're just your type

To design a Chinese typeface, designer first needs to make drafts of hundreds of basic characters on paper. [Photo by Feng Yongbin/China Daily]

In Treasure Cove, where pirates of the Caribbean battle for the sunken treasure, the hieroglyphs on the logo are as if they were written by quill on parchment.

In Tomorrowland, where tourists ride a light cycle in the science fiction action-adventure film Tron, the characters are presented in a high-tech digital style, italicized as if they, too, are in a rush.

Most of the Chinese typefaces used on the signs in Disneyland Shanghai are designed by Makefont, a typeface studio in Weifang, Shandong province, that employees about 10 people.

"When Disney released the animation Alice in Wonderland in China in 2010, the Chinese translation on the poster used a fairly plain typeface," says Ding Yi, the founder of Makefont.

"Out of pure interest I designed a new one for it, giving those Chinese characters a feeling of bizarre, curly tendrils to match the English font and Tim Burton's gothic style."

Ding put his remake of the poster online, and people at Disney took note. Two years later, when Ding bid for Disney's localization project for its signage in Shanghai, he won.

Over the past four years Makefont has designed about 100 different typefaces for the logos used in the theme park.