In the very old years, the people of Shang (a - Cchatty

In the very old years, the people of Shang (a dynasty) created characters written on bones and tortoise shells.

Then, people recorded things on metals, bamboo slips, and cloth, until papei was invented. After this, any kind of typefaces appeared.

In the modern ages, you can see Chinese people writing in a way called Regular-Script (楷书). Some people are interested in old characters, so they use Xiaozhuan (小篆) and so on as an interest.

The main ways that Chinese forefathers used to create hanzi (basic parts of the Chinese language) was:

象形. For example, draw a circle and a dot in the circle makes the basic form of “日”, which means “Sun”.

指示. Look at the picture. If I add an across on the bottom of the character (木, wood), a “本”(means “beginning”) is made.

会意. Put 2 or more characters created in the way of 象形 together to make a new character,
and we call this 会意.

形声. We all know words have their pronunciations. Putting a character with a similar pronunciation as a part of the new word, and using another character with a meaning similar to the new word in this as well, make a new character. e.g. 财 sounds “Tsai”. The right part sounds like “Tsai” as well. The left part means shell, a thing people used to deal with in the past. So “财” just means money.