Typography

Language is essential to the way we communicate and perceive the world. Having language support can help users feel more connected to the product that they are using. Designers should pick the right font choices that can support all the language needs of users.

Typeface

Many designers can get really creative with typeface choices to convey certain moods or feelings. In the context of designing cross-language products, the room to get creative with typefaces may be smaller. For instance, there are very select few typefaces that can cover most languages in the world because there are so many different characters in various languages such as Chinese, Arabic, and Russian Cyrillic.

When designing for an international audience, some typefaces to think about are Noto and Noto Sans, which are created by Google to support more than 800+ languages around the world. It is crucial to emphasize that you may not need a typeface that works for hundreds of languages. Intentionality is key, and we must know whether we are trying to design for internationalization or localization. If we do not intend on providing our product to East Asian countries, then we may not need East Asian language support.

Learn more about Google’s Noto and Noto Sans.

Font

When it comes to fonts and font settings, it is important to notice the impact of switching between languages of different scripts or writing systems. While English, French, and German could be from the same script, Chinese and Japanese come from completely different scripts with their own rules when it comes to sizing and spacing.

Some of the most important processes to do are to assign specific font sizes, line heights, and character-spacing settings for each language. Chinese, Japanese, and many other languages have more complex characters and shapes compared to Latin script, thus it is important to have larger font sizes, higher line heights, and more character spacing.

Reach more about Google’s resource on language support for fonts.

Tools

When working on a cross-cultural design project, it is beneficial to choose the best designer tools that have support for a variety of languages that can deliver working final deliverables that can render across various browsers and devices. Designers can work closely with developers on topics of character encodings, font embedding, and web fonts.