道
Symbols Life
path
ㄉㄠˋ dào
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.
The way you travel - and in Chinese, unavoidably, the Way as a philosophical idea as well.
Before you commit
Choose with care道 is enormously broad - road, to speak, a doctrine, a measure word for rivers and questions. Alone it reads as the Way to some readers and simply as road to others.
JapaneseRead michi or dō in Japanese, where it ends the names of disciplines like 柔道 and 書道. Japanese readers will very likely claim it first.
At small sizesThirteen strokes with a long sweeping base stroke. That sweep needs room; on a narrow placement it flattens and the character loses its balance.
Meaning
Road, way, method, doctrine; the Dao of Daoist and Buddhist thought.
One character carrying both the physical road and the moral or spiritual way.
Other characters for “path”
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