The Promise of a “Universal” Typeface
I. Moving toward a universal typeface
In today’s world of mass media dissemination, it’s possible that that the information and digital experiences that one person encounters mirror those of someone else across the globe. In fact, in many cases, all that requires immediate localization for a digital product is the language of the text that each user sees on her device. As a result, designing typefaces and font families to be well-suited to many languages is a goal that’s become increasingly pressing for designers building digital products that transcend geographic boundaries. While the character, curves, and uniqueness of a typeface remain paramount in the type designer’s mind, these nuances take on a more glaringly granular scale when accommodations for multiple alphabets enter the scope of typeface designs.
Before assessing several typefaces with large-scale international capabilities, I’d like to acknowledge that it would be a mistake to argue that facilitating translation from one language to another is, or ought to be, every typographer’s goal. Unsurprisingly, typefaces run the gamut in terms of number of supported languages. Helvetica, for instance, supports 97; Noto, more than 800; and most typefaces unfortunately only the Latin alphabet.
Fortunately, the burgeoning type design ambition to accommodate many alphabets extends almost the same model designers employ when creating a single-language typeface. Crafting any alphabet involves careful side-by-side comparison of unlike letters in order to determine how similar different forms ought to appear. It’s an exercise in abstraction and then re-contextualization — looking at stem lengths and serif hooks in isolation as weightless marks on a page, then piecing them together as letters, words, and sentences that start to create real color. Add to the table hundreds more glyphs and you just have more pieces of the puzzle to fit back together.
The image above is a brief timeline of larger efforts toward a universal typeface that have been undertaken. Evidently, some of these typefaces are more successful than others in terms of scale and legibility, weights and styles offered, and overall quality. When considering these typefaces, the dialogue surrounding their efficacy seems to shift to a different kind of definition of success. Those criteria are inherently different than the evaluating principles for typefaces with fewer glyphs, if only because of their additional intent to function optimally for disparate languages. New criteria that enter the conversation include but are not limited to whether or not the shapes and width and height of the glyphs move seamlessly from one alphabet to another, as well as the degree to which these typefaces accommodate special characters.
II. Noto et al.
Remember Noto, the typeface family called out above for its support of more than 800 languages? It seems that precisely because of the project’s remarkable scale, Noto merits closer study when we think about “universal” typefaces. Funded and directed by Google in collaboration with Monotype, Noto is the largest and most ambitious undertaking that the world of typefaces has ever witnessed; actually, because it supports so many different scripts, Noto refers to a family of extremely similar typefaces, not a single one. In order to manage what could quickly have become an unwieldy list of hundreds of decentralized languages, type designers on the Noto project worked closely with the Unicode Consortium, a twenty-year-old organization that codifies languages. (More on the Unicode admissions process for a new language here).
Many of Noto’s offerings are languages that have never before been digitized, only read in various handwritten scripts. Merely bringing certain languages up to speed with modern technology is a feat in and of itself, and for scholars tasked with preserving ancient texts, having access to any typeface, not to mention one with Noto’s fluidity, is a boon to conservation efforts. Not only has it digitized more languages than any other typeface, it’s also clean, humanist, and scales extremely well. By most accounts, Noto is a resounding success.
But could Noto (and similar typefaces like its predecessor Roboto) be sacrificing anything along the way? Several considerations appear to drop off on Noto’s quest to become an all-encompassing type system and eliminate all cases of tofu (box-like symbols that appear when a character cannot be digitally rendered on a screen). Anything owned and developed by a brand always raises issues of conflicts of interest; Google’s enormous investment suggests an economic imperative for the company that should bring them not only notoriety but also a sizable addition of recently digitized documents and new languages to their search engine. This fact begs the question of whether Noto represents the world, bringing infrequently read and studied languages and cultures to the forefront, or merely contributes to the Google-ization of the world.
Problems arise, too, with ethnocentric categorizations of languages that Google describes on its Material Design website. Grouping all languages into one of three types (“English-like,” “tall,” or “dense”) seems to maintain the English language’s stronghold as the world’s primary language from which all other languages are translated. Not only do these categories seem over-simplified, but they also imply a grouping mechanism that looks at the shape of sequences of letters on the page, rather than at more minute details of individual glyphs. This top-down approach risks losing some of the character of the individual languages along the way in a kind of digital homogenization. (The fact that Google’s Roboto typeface seems to borrow key features of several ubiquitous typefaces does little to offset this cumulative homogeny).
Although troublesome, none of the aforementioned concerns are meant to cut down the admirably iterative, studied process that marks the 300-person Noto project staffed with linguistic typographers, researchers, and cultural experts that’s going on its sixth year; rather, they attempt to engage in a more nuanced discussion about the many challenges that impede the creation of an entirely universal typeface.
III. What this means for designers
Having access to massive, open source font families like Roboto and Noto certainly lifts some of the burden off the designer with an international project, but she’ll find that her work is not quite done. Designers who look to typography to inject a sense of life and unique expression into projects may find themselves hesitant to adopt these typefaces in every case that requires translation. Seeing Noto or Roboto by default seems to be a way of checking out of the complexities of implementing several typefaces into a project accommodates many languages but aims to highlight a specific few. If nothing else, using these typefaces in every multi-lingual project is a fast-track to work that all starts to look the same, as anything free of all idiosyncrasies risks becoming bland and forgettable. Typographic character is far from the only element that makes a brand or project recognizable, but when it’s treated systematically yet uniquely, the work truly shines.
Ultimately, deciding on a type system for a project with global reach is a matter of making one set of concessions or another: choose a typeface like Noto or Roboto that, while ubiquitous and expected, surely works, or commit to the more complicated task of assembling a custom set of complementary but not entirely homogenous typefaces and dig into the richness of their differences.
What typefaces have you found to work well for your global challenges? Comment here or tweet at us @grandstudiodsgn.
