Joo Ha

Challenges facing Korean type designers

As I designed a Korean typeface, I find many challenges for Korean type designers face today. There are two reasons for these challenges – one is technical difficulty to convert Korean into a digital font and the other is poor public recognition of typeface designs. I have seen a number of designers who recently have been promoting many designed typefaces to the public, and I could see their struggle to overcome difficulties.

The Korean writing system is well-known for its practicality and simplicity. However, its modular font system gets very complicated when it comes to digitizing a font. Unlike western font designers who only need to design 26 characters, Korean designers need to consider designing thousands of various modular combinations of different characters. Moreover, since most Korean font designers are using western font creating software, which focuses on linear writing systems for westerners, it becomes even harder for the designers to create a modular typeface.

In spite of these technical difficulties mentioned above, there is very little recognition on font designers/ font design in Korean society. There is little appreciation of designed typeface and font designers are living at the very bottom among various design fields. Therefore, it is easier for people o get an illegal copies of typeface and degrades the perceived value of type design. Because of this assumption, the market for the type house is relatively small when compared to the west and prices for each font need to be kept at a low level.

In spite of these challenges, there have been many slow changes throughout Korean society. Recently I read news about Newspaper companies which have begun to use a typeface specifically designed for their company. Moreover, designing customized typefaces are becoming popular amongst the general public. However, it is still hard for me to find professionally designed Korean typefaces. I have heard from many Korean designers that many type designers start their career with almost no typographical knowledge because of poor typographic design education in Korea. In order to overcome these challenges, designers should have better knowledge about Korean typography which will ultimately influence the development of Korean typeface.

My thesis is not about simply creating an interesting Korean typeface. Since my goal of this thesis is to provide more font choices to designers in Korea, I want to create a neutral typeface which can be widely used in various designs.  To serve this purpose, I will create a typeface that looks good in a big size and is readable in a small text.   

I do not want the thesis to become a mere self-study of Korean typography. Although I will challenge myself by exploring Korean typography, I do not want to stop at the stage of creating a font. My goal for the thesis is also to provide the typeface to Korean designers, who have very few choices of typefaces to work with. Therefore, I decided to build a website as a means to distribute the typeface that I design.

I want the website to be kept in a very simple user-friendly format with one or two pages. Because the focus is oin creating a typeface, not designing a web site, I will keep the site as basic as possible, so that it functions as a simply way for designers to access the font.

Rather than following footsteps of traditional Korean typefaces, I decided to follow a different approach to design a font, which is a new movement among Korean leading typographers. There are 28 characters in Korean, and multiple characters are combined to form a syllable. Traditionally, the combination of the characters for a syllable always has to fit in a square box, and this rule requires designing for each combination of characters for each syllable. Therefore, this rule requires designing more than a thousand characters to accomodate different combinations of the characters fitted in a square box. Hence, recent typographers decided to break the rule, and encourage other designers to design typefaces that do not require the combination of the characters to fit in a square, thus requiring only 72 characters to design. I also find that this recent approach provides visual rhythm and flow whereas the traditional Korean typeface is locked in a square and has a rigid visual effect.