I often get the question “what if I place my Chinese characters vertically instead of horizontally…  does the meaning then change?”

If it’s a VALID set of Chinese characters, the short answer is no…  in that sense, it’s no different than English.  For example…

McDonald’s

…  has the same meaning as…

M
c
D
o
n
a
l
d
‘
s

The only time where there MAY be some confusion is with horizontal writing.  For the most part these days, horizontal writing is performed from left-to-right (top-to-bottom)…  tho there are occasions where short phrases are still performed the old school way (i.e. signs), from right-to-left, depending on context.

Traditionally, writing was performed vertically, from top to bottom, right-to-left…  this has changed more and more to horizontal writing (probably over the past 50 or so years)…  partly due to the influence of European languages, and especially propagated by the use of computers…  most of which only supports horizontal writing.