SamsungOne font becomes the company’s official universal typeface for all of its products

Abner Li | Jul 22 2016 - 8:40 am PT

Following Google and Apple, Samsung is the latest company to design its own font to represent its brand. SamsungOne is a universal typeface that will be featured on everything from smartphones to appliances. Reflecting the company’s global presence, SamsungOne is a family of scripts that covers 26 writing systems, more than 400 languages, and over 25,000 glyphs.

SamsungOne is a reflection of the company’s increasing design skills, as seen in the past two Galaxy phones. The font will be “at the heart of Samsung’s new visual language DNA, and provides a typographic foundation for the future.” It wants to provide a cohesive and universal experience when using Samsung’s wide range of products.

A big goal of SamsungOne was to create a font that not only worked on smaller devices, like smartphones and smartwatches, but also on packaging and promotional campaigns. While Samsung is not specific on when or where we’ll first see the font in use, it alludes to mobile phones, TVs, laptops, tablets, microwaves, and ovens.

It appears that the font was not entirely designed in-house by Samsung, but rather with the help of design firm Brody Associates. The company also worked with a number of “specialists” to bring the font to other languages.

In creating the font, Samsung stuck to five typographic principles and characteristics:

Humanist: SamsungOne mixes a simple, single-width stroke with more calligraphic details. A squared curve is combined with angled terminal ends to create a font which is very human, flowing and open.
Distinctive: Dynamic angles that come from how an arc joins a line create a consistent design personality. Prominent dots, distinctive diacritics and the tail on l add legibility as well we provide some of the distinctive design DNA for SamsungOne.
Universal: Like a global Family, SamsungOne is uniquely localized while speaking some of the same typeface DNA.
Expert: A crafted hands-on approach to type design and detail where small adjustments to height plus descenders and ascenders ensure balanced forms. A balanced and proportional set of characters aids consistency.
Legible/Scalable: Letterforms are specifically designed to work functionally at small sizes, and dynamically at large sizes. Characters are open and spacious aiding readability. Specific details are added to ensure legibility at text sizes.