Ming Romantic (明日體) is a display typeface, which reimagines a style of printed type originating in China’s Song and Ming dynasties. The typeface is one of the first romantic, didone-inspired Chinese typefaces that re-imagines how characters could look when divorced from the effects of the brush. The Ming dynasty saw a rise of print production in China. The introduction of mechanized printing processes slowly led to visual shifts in the form of printed type away from calligraphic forms due to the economic pressures of book production. Ming Romantic took this as a starting point and pushed it to a formal extreme. It is an exploration of the tension between hand and machine and how the tools of production influence form. Ming Romantic is rooted in the belief that the form of letters tell a story—one of economics, production, communication, and beauty—that is of its time, yet universal.