Chinese Brand Name

For Chinese people, names have very significant meaning and a bad name choice sends a negative message to consumers. Using a direct Chinese translation of your English brand name will probably result in an unintended meaning, or the meaning getting lost. Your brand image will likely be damaged because the name will sound odd to Chinese speakers or have negative connotations. Similarly just using your English brand name may be difficult for Chinese people to pronounce or recognise. In many cases, if you don’t have a Chinese name, the market will create one for you and it could be difficult to effectively control of your brand name and trade marks.

We create clever and meaningful Chinese brand names for Australian businesses dealing with Chinese audiences. Brand name creation is an art form – it involves strategy, creativity, ingenuity and a future perspective.

How to successfully create a Chinese name:

• Choose Chinese words which have strong meaning and represent the unique identity and qualities of your brand.
• Aim to achieve phonetic similarity between the English and Chinese brand names – this is important for brand recognition across different languages and markets.
• Make sure the name isn’t too specific that it doesn’t allow the brand to evolve or diversify its product range.
• Make sure that the Chinese name doesn’t sound like something unlucky according to Chinese superstition – this is a real concern when choose Chinese brand names
• Check the Chinese trade mark registry for potential infringements

Our service includes:

• Recommend Chinese brand name, with two alternatives to consider
• Explanation of the name, right from individual meaning of each character to the overall feel and impression
• Search of Chinese trade mark registry

Typography

There are hundreds of different Chinese font styles – which is why it’s important to have a consistent font that matches your brand’s image and personality.  We can help you choose a typography set that matches the ‘look and feel’ of your English-text documents.

Chinese fonts

Chinese font classifications are very similar to English ones. In Chinese, the two most commonly used classifications are song ti, which you could think of as the Chinese serif, and hei ti, similar to a sans-serif. The word “ti” 体 essentially means “font”, so you can expect to see that word at the end of many font names.The font SimSun (or Zhongyi Songti in Chinese) is the Times New Roman of Simplified Chinese and is one of the most popular fonts for Chinese websites. Whereas, Simhei was the standard sans-serif Chinese font. Like in English, the sans-serif fonts are considered more ‘modern’ and ‘clean’, while the serif fonts have a much more traditional feel.

Our process

1. Look and Feel: The first step is to create a short list of suitable fonts that match the look and feel of your brand. It helps if there are consistent stylistic features across the Chinese and English fonts as this will help reinforce your brand’s identity.
2. Compatibility: It is essential to make sure that your desired fonts are all easily available across the software that your organisation uses (e.g. Microsoft Office or Indesign etc) and that they will be displayed correctly on a range of web browsers (note: some fonts are not accessible within the Chinese firewall).
3. Typography guidelines: We will provide you with a customised typography set with Chinese-English samples side-by-side. We also provide a range of alternative or secondary fonts, in the event that your primary fonts are not available on certain software. These typography guidelines can be easily included in your brand’s ‘corporate guidelines’ document.
4. Feedback and revisions: The final step is to go through a process of feedback and revisions to ensure that you are 100% satisfied with the look and use-ability of your typography set.

Chinese Logo

Now that you’ve got a Chinese name, you might be wondering how to use it with your current logo. Our design team can help cleverly integrate your Chinese name into your existing logo design, ensuring consistency of branding whilst enhancing your image in Chinese-speaking market.

Our service

• Clever integration of Chinese name into your existing logo design
• Explanation of rationale for design strategy
• Multiple variations; e.g. Chinese-only, Chinese-English combo etc
• Adobe illustrator design files
• Transparent background (PNG files) and opague background variations