idea

意

ㄧˋ yì

Two versions of the same picture, and both are free with no account and no watermark. The first has no background at all, which is the one to send your artist — but a phone or computer photo viewer set to dark will show black strokes on dark grey and it can look like nothing downloaded. If that happens, use the second one: identical characters on a plain white background. Either way you get the characters on their own — the square and the faint guide lines you see above are not in the file. Each character is 1000px, so a two-character download is 2000×1000, and the script and layout are the ones you picked.

Script

Characters

Layout

A thought you could act on. Chinese has no exact single character; the nearest one means intent and meaning.

Before you commit

Choose with care意 does not mean a clever idea. It means intent or the sense of a thing, so 意 alone will not read as invention or inspiration.

Pairs well with創意 for a creative idea, 心意 for the feeling behind a gift. 意 is at its best as the second character of a pair.

At small sizesThirteen strokes, sound above heart. Tall and stacked, so it wants vertical room rather than width.

Meaning

Intent, meaning; what somebody has in mind.

Closer to intention than to a bright idea, but the root of every such word.

Other characters for “idea”

What to do next

Pick the script and layout you want above, download the PNG, and send that file to your artist. Ask them to work from the file rather than redrawing the character freehand — that is where strokes go missing.

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