During the recent 10 years, visual design community has seen the remarkable development of calligraphy combined with design, especially its commercial use. The widely use of calligraphy in advertisements, CIs, BIs, movies and editorial designs is beca...
During the recent 10 years, visual design community has seen the remarkable development of calligraphy combined with design, especially its commercial use. The widely use of calligraphy in advertisements, CIs, BIs, movies and editorial designs is because of its unique function of clearly expressing the essential points of products, advertising concepts by fonts, raising consumers' attention, promoting their memories and contributing to differentiation strategies.
The highly visual image of calligraphy not only functions as its fundamental delivery of information but also enhancement of E-value by offering artistic impression and pleasure.
Though calligraphy can be classified into different types, few studies have been done on what kind of calligraphy is efficient for consumer's cognitive responses or memories.
This study divides calligraphy into two categories; 1) common calligraphy which is only pretentious in shapes or conveys information without formativeness, aesthetic or creativity, 2) calligraphy of 'hieroglyph with symbolic meaning' that concretely expresses the meaning, movement, sound and form of a character or a word. The author defines the latter as calligraphy with higher hieroglyph and makes a hypothesis that the more hieroglyphic calligraphy is, the more efficiently it would influence on receivers' support persistence and memories among their cognitive responses to examine consumer's attitude.
The research tasks are as follows.
Firstly, what cognitive response can we expect when the receiver reacts with the calligraphy of hieroglyph with symbolic meaning? Secondly, can we assume that the receiver's remembrance is in more favor of the calligraphy of hieroglyph with symbolic meaning than non-hieroglyphic calligraphy?
In the second literature review, the author referred to academic journals, publications, books, websites and newspapers to investigate definition and case of calligraphy, principal of hieroglyph in making Hangul, concept and case of calligraphy of hieroglyph with symbolic meaning in Hangul fonts and case and effects of calligraphy of hieroglyph with symbolic meaning in Chinese letters, alphabet and Arabic. Cognitive response theory, memory theory, and visual memory theory are studied as well.
In the first investigation of empirical study, 'Cheonjisam,' a brand name of red ginseng product, is randomly selected for making three kinds of samples with non-hieroglyphic calligraphy, low-hieroglyphic calligraphy and high-hieroglyphic calligraphy. After adding seven common calligraphy, the author conducted a survey on memory, cognitive response and emotional reaction with 10 calligraphy in total.
The result is as follows.
Firstly, hypothesis 1 is confirmed in that the high-hieroglyphic calligraphy shows more support in the analysis of the support and refutation persistence of the receiver.
Secondly, hypothesis 2 is confirmed that high-hieroglyphic calligraphy also shows that receivers can remember it better according to the result from investigation of the receiver's memory.
Such result shows that high-hieroglyphic calligraphy derives support persistence happening in corresponding their own beliefs in cognitive response theory and prove the research hypotheses right. In addition, Paivio's message memory theory saying that memory can be improved by presenting memory of the word or picture corresponding with the word is also confirmed.
Therefore, high-hieroglyphic calligraphy with formativeness, aesthetic and creativity compared to non-hieroglyphic calligraphy or simply-hieroglyphic calligraphy showing mere meaning of products or brand names is proven to attract higher cognitive response and draw emotional reaction of consumers, promote their memory and meet consumers' needs in E-valu era which stresses expression of individuality and it can directly lead to purchase behavior.