People ask me often: what is gufeng, the old style? Silk and satin? Pavilions and towers? A vocabulary of archaisms?
To my mind it is first of all a state of mind that shows up as taste — leaving blank, holding back, keeping warm.
Three Flavours of the Old Style
The first is empty space. Treat the blank as ink; where nothing is painted, everything works. What moves people most on a page is usually not what has been put there, but what has been left out.
The second is restraint. One dot of cinnabar beats a page of heavy ink. Brocade everywhere turns vulgar; on plain xuan paper a single small red seal is the whole accent.
The third is warmth. No drawn swords, no shouting. Both the words and the layout should be unhurried, like an old friend talking under a lamp.
When substance outweighs form, the result is crude; when form outweighs substance, it is pedantic. Only when the two are in balance is one a gentleman.
Put into design, this comes to: paper for the ground, ink for the letters, cinnabar for the seal, bamboo green for ornament. The type follows the Song and Kai lineages; the text keeps the Chinese two-character indent, which is the only way it sits right on the page.
In Closing
The old style is not revivalism, and it is not turning a website into a museum piece. It is keeping a little of the old elegance inside a modern skeleton.
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