| Sumario: | This article considers the development of graphic design in early twentieth-century China as a response to the possibilities and challenges posed by China's conversion to industrial printing. Focusing on the use of huabian (the Chinese term for page-border decoration) in a series of literary periodicals, I show how Chinese publishers mobilized Japanese-made moveable-type ornaments to signal the newness of the reformist "new fiction" enterprise. This article further traces the subsequent rise of customized page-border design in Chinese literary magazines; deviating from the standardized aesthetics of mass-produced type ornaments, local graphic artists drew inspiration from the visual resources of antiquity. Although scholars in design history and design studies have abundantly explored the meaning-bearing and meaning-making capacities of graphic arts, the literary potentialities of graphic design have yet to be fully recognized in Chinese studies. Attending to the mutual constitution and mutual illumination between literature and graphic design, this article shows how the evolving graphic landscape of Chinese periodicals marked a series of regime shifts in the making of modern Chinese literature.
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