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Selecting the best fonts for an international product speaks volumes about how much a company cares about customers in those locales. Font design aesthetics, technical limitations and cultural requirements should be addressed when creating global software, hardware, documentation, and branding materials.

Aesthetic Considerations

Choosing the right Non-Latin font to complement a Latin font

Mixing languages, and the scripts used to represent those languages, can cause a lack of harmony in a product and its documentation. Figure 1 illustrates a multilingual document with various fonts used to typeset a variety of languages. In this case the Asian languages are high contrast ideographs compared to the more monoline sans serif font used for the English phrase (in red). The Hebrew is very dark; the Arabic very calligraphic – even the Czech and German are using a very different font style than the English. In contrast, figure 2 illustrates how a harmonized or complementary set of fonts can be used to create a more aesthetically pleasing and balanced document.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Multilingual fonts can be used to coordinate an interface, publication or corporate brand. Many fonts are available “off-the-shelf” from various font developer websites. Fonts may also be created as customized solutions to solve specific design or linguistic issues. Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, for example, are closely related to Latin but are not supported in most other fonts. They are so closely tied to the Latin alphabet, however, that it is usually easiest to have professional font designers add these alphabets to an existing Latin font.

For many non-Latin languages there is little variety in the choice of font design. There may be tens of thousands of Latin font designs but less than a hundred Thai, Hebrew or Arabic font designs. It is occasionally possible to find non-Latin font designs which are visually related to a given Latin font. But due to the wide variety of Latin font designs available this is typically the exception rather than the rule. The ideal scenario is to create a custom font design which visually links together multiple languages and alphabets.

Technical Considerations

Pitfalls of not thinking beyond a Latin-based Interface

Oftentimes we are given a set of user-interface dimensions and asked to provide a font that fits inside these boundaries. If the user interface was designed with only English in mind, it is probably going to be less-than-ideal for supporting other languages. Figure 3 illustrates an interface that cannot accommodate Cyrillic letters ‘U’ and ‘Kje’ without causing lines of text to be exceedingly close to each other. Descending letters like ‘g’ could collide with the line below (left side second and third lines). The right side of Figure 3 shows how simply adding 2 pixels to the interface’s vertical dimension will eliminate potential collisions.

Figure 3

Cyrillic is actually relatively easy compared to the vertical-space challenges of Thai, Vietnamese and Arabic. These scripts require so much vertical space that products made for these markets should have dimensions adjusted specifically to accommodate the most troublesome combinations of characters.

Cultural Considerations

Recognizing preferences in local writing styles

Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean share ideographs (characters) as defined by the Unicode Standard (www.unicode.org). However many ideographs have a preferred localized shape for each of the separate languages. As an example, figure 3 illustrates the same Unicode code point for two different ideographs that have very different shapes depending on whether the reader prefers Traditional or Simplified Chinese.

Figure 4

While these subtleties are often overlooked in recognition of the complexity of these languages, choosing the preferred form helps to fine tune a product for a specific audience.

Conclusion

People all over the world are becoming more accustomed to products that cater to personal needs and preferences. Getting the translation right is part of the battle. Getting the translation to look good, display correctly and with the right cultural nuance is the finishing touch that makes any global product more successful.

About the Author of this Article

This guest article was authored by Steve Matteson, Director of Type Design for Ascender Corporation. Steve has completed numerous font designs for global customers including Microsoft’s Vista user interface fonts, Google’s Android mobile platform and the Xbox 360. He lives in Louisville, Colorado.

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