興
Symbols Life
prosperity
ㄒㄧㄥ xīng
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.
Thriving - a household, a business or a life doing well and growing. Chinese has a whole family of characters for flourishing.
Before you commit
Choose with care興 reads as rising and starting up more than as being wealthy. If you want settled abundance rather than momentum, 盛 or 昌 fits better.
JapaneseShared with Japanese, where the same glyph carries the sense of interest and enthusiasm as well as prosperity.
At small sizesSixteen strokes, wide and symmetrical. It wants horizontal space; on a narrow placement it compresses badly.
Meaning
To flourish, rise, thrive; to start something up.
Prosperity as upward motion rather than a settled state.
Other characters for “prosperity”
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.
Read more
This character is one of the ten in a longer piece on what a character carries beyond its dictionary meaning.
Related concepts