TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Nov 20 11:56:54 EST 2024

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ABOUT

Source Han Sans

In July 2014, Adobe and Google jointly announced the publication of the free Asian typeface family Source Han Sans for Chinese (traditional (both Taiwan and Hong Kong) and simplified), Japanese, Korean, Greek, Cyrillic and Latin. This project, based on designs originally due to Ryoko Nishizuka, a senior Adobe designer in Tokyo, started in 2010. The fonts and original code are downloadable from SourceForge and GitHub. Blog page at Typekit. Blog post at Google. The other name for the family, Noto Sans CJK, is used by Google.The open source license even permits modification of the glyphs.

The 42 fonts are designed for small devices, and thus, the glyphs are monolinear and simple. Each font weight in the family has a total of 65,535 glyphs (the maximum number of characters supported in the OpenType format), and the entire family contains just under half a million total glyphs. Adobe sought expertise from foundries such as Iwata Corp to expand the Japanese glyph selection, Sandoll Communication, designer of Korean Hangul and Changzhou SinoType, Adobe's longtime collaborator in China.

On the Google side of the project, where the fonts are added to the Noto Sans and Noto Serif (which covers all major languages of the world and many others, including European, African, Middle Eastern, Indic, South and Southeast Asian, Central Asian, American, and East Asian languages, and, since the joint release with Adobe in 2014, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and minority languages related to them), users can download all Noto fonts freely in a 43 MB file.

References: Ken Lunde (Adobe) on the design and development of Pan-CJK fonts (2010). Inside the fonts, we find these credits: Ken Lunde (project architect, glyph set definition & overall production), Masataka Hattori (production & ideograph elements), Ryoko Nishizuka (kana & ideographs), Paul D. Hunt (Latin, Greek & Cyrillic), Wenlong Zhang (bopomofo), Sandoll Communication, Soo-young Jang & Joo-yeon Kang (Hangul elements, letters & syllables).

At ATypI 2014 in Barcelona, the project was explained by product managers Stuart Gill of Google and Caleb Belohlavek of Adobe.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Source Han Sans
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ Type design in Japan ⦿ Type design in China ⦿ Korean (Hangul) ⦿ Type design in South Korea ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ Type design in Taiwan ⦿ Hong Kong font scene ⦿