A designer adjusts characters for a typeface on computer. [Photo by Feng Yongbin/China Daily]

It was an art class in middle school that let Ding to become a typeface designer.

"I can still remember the teacher showing us how to write decorative Chinese characters," says Ding, who dropped out of high school and started designing commercial logos in the 1990s.

He bought his first computer in 1998 and taught himself web design. He later worked for sohu.com in Beijing as a designer.

"Typefaces are an indispensable part of web design, and I realized there was a dearth of typefaces for Chinese characters on computer."

In 2009 Ding returned to his hometown of Weifang and founded his own type foundry.

There are tens of thousands of typefaces for Latin languages on computer, but for Chinese there are only about 1,000.

Even the biggest typeface provider in China, Foundertype, has only about 300 Chinese typeface products. The sheer number of Chinese characters is what hinders the design of digital typefaces.