Google Noto & User Experience: The Common Ground of Inclusiveness

Let’s try to visualise User Experience. For sure you can imagine flows, customer journeys, personas. But do you ever visualise typefaces? Usually not, at least if you are not a typeface designer.

[Typeface designers are the ones that take into consideration those tiny signs that make the human communication everlasting and that make it possible for you to read this article through a certain kind of device]

Among flows, icons, buttons, colored shapes, a typeface is a consistent part of User Experience.

Unicode Consortium, the non-profit organization that aims to encode, represent, and handle the text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems, counts 109.242 characters. It means that if I type a K on my Whatsapp chat, no matter what kind of typeface you are using, you will surely see the same K.

It seems there is no problem at all and everything is fine and under control. But when can we face a real problem?

If we think about all the known languages and the 109.242 typographical characters and we imagine to develop a global website, an application or a digital service that aims to be comprehensible to most of the know idioms, well, then we have a problem. While I am writing there is no typeface that covers all those characters. We do love fancy, well-designed and reliable typefaces, we truly do.

But does “a digital language for everyone” exist?

To design a complete typeface that contains 109.242 typographical characters that respects the Unicode standard seems a mission impossible. Not for Google Inc. and Monotype.

Released in 2013, Noto Sans is the typeface five years in the making designed by Google and Monotype with the mission to cover more than 800 languages and to become the digital language for everyone. Google first brief was “no more tofu”.

Tofu are the blank boxes displayed when a device lacks font support for a particular character. So, the naming, NOmore TOfu, Noto.

At the core of inclusiveness stand projects like Noto, with the aim to make the world accessible and free for everyone, with the incredible result of making knowledge available for everyone.

For me this is the true meaning of inclusiveness.

This is an ambitious project that requires a lot of effort and a lot of foresight, among several different skills from many professionals and communities, making Noto Sans design a global participatory project were Armenian communities or Tibetan monks are equally involved.

As we live in a digital world and care about a typeface to cover all the known languages on our devices, this is also a project of cultural preservation of our history as humans. A lot of scripts included in Noto Sans were never digitised before, giving now the chance to those communities to use their scripts digitally.

To step into the future, we need to secure our past.

References: https://www.google.com/get/noto/ | https://www.monotype.com | http://www.unicode.org