William Pan

I live in Los Angeles and am writing a memoir of Taiwan.

Selected work

An essay on themes of material, craft, and visual production, written for Harsh Patel’s graphic design reader Thinking in English. The full text has been posted to Instagram.

For Nathan Rickard and Lauren Graycar’s film Trot trot trot, I translated a selection of Robert Walser’s short stories into Standard Chinese, with assistance from Jana Townsend and my father Dinkae Robin Pan. In the film, the protagonist Zhou Bao Yang reads the translated text aloud in her native Hoiping dialect.

With Ian Erickson, I designed the current wordmark for his experimental publication Disc. The letters are from the 2023 variable font version of Robert Slimbach’s Acumin, adjusted to fit in a 3 × 1 rectangle.

A book of my photographs of my childhood home in Santa Barbara, designed, bound, and published by Lauren Graycar and Nathan Rickard as book 6 of their collaborative publishing project Cherry. The title is the name of the neighborhood where the house is located, as translated into Chinese by our neighbor Pai Hsien-yung in his essay “The trees are still thus”.

An online archive of writing and translations.

While a student at the University of California, Berkeley, I designed and typeset issues 45 through 48 of Berkeley Poetry Review. Further issues continued to use my templates.