向
Symbols Life
moving on
前
ㄒㄧㄤˋ ㄑㄧㄢˊ xiàng qián
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
Same in both
Layout
Rubbing mode: white on black, as a stone rubbing. The download is unaffected.
Leaving something behind and going forward with your life. Chinese has no set phrase for this; it says forward, or names the letting go.
Before you commit
Choose with careThere is no Chinese equivalent of moving on in the emotional sense. 向前 says go forward and leaves the rest unsaid; the spoken phrase is 走出來, to walk out of it.
Pairs well with勇往直前, press straight ahead without flinching, is the four-character idiom closest to the spirit of the English phrase.
At small sizesTwo characters, fifteen strokes, both open and airy. Reads cleanly at small scale and on a curve.
Meaning
Forward; facing ahead, going onward.
The natural way to say it — the direction rather than the leaving.
Other characters for “moving on”
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.
Related concepts