On April 27th, at the UCAN 2019 Design Conference, Alibaba announced the launch of the official system font - Alibaba Pratt.
The font will be licensed to the global public free of charge. As a commercial body font, "Puhuiti" can be used in all scenarios.
It is understood that this font contains a total of 116895 full-size Chinese characters (including 5 weights), and the Western Alibaba Sans has a total of 7205 Latin letters (2 styles, a total of 11 weights), Covering 172 languages (covering most European-speaking countries).
Word weight: The thickness of font strokes. Generally, Thin, Light, Regular, Book, Bold, Black, Heavy, etc. marked after the font family name are all weight names.
Slender and tall "net celebrity" figure
Ali is by no means the first company to customize fonts. Tencent, Google, Apple, and Xiaomi have all launched their own fonts.
However, except for Google’s Siyuan HeiTi, which is a free open source font, the use of the other three fonts is slightly limited. Tencent fonts do not support external authorization for the time being; Apple’s Pingfang font can only be used on Apple devices, and Xiaomi’s Xiao Milan Pavilion The body can only be used on the Xiaomi mobile terminal.
Figure/Tencent's old and new font comparison
In contrast, this set of fonts launched by Ali is a well-deserved "inclusive body".
Let’s take a closer look at this font.
It is understood that this font took 10 months from the first draft to the completion.
The Chinese design of "Puhui Font" is produced under the guidance of Wen Shensheng, deputy general manager of Hanyi Font, and Zhu Zhiwei, art director of Hanyi Font; the designer of the Western font is the well-known design company Mona Font ( Akira Kobayashi, Director of Monotype.
In order to better integrate usage scenarios and brand features into the font, the character width of this font has been narrowed from 1000 to 984. The font is thin and long, and the visual center of gravity is slightly higher.
Picture/Inclusive Body
In terms of details, the different weights of "Puhuiti" have also been specially treated. The word "国" in the picture below is an example. The title word omits the footer part, which is more concise and powerful.
Picture/Inclusive Body
For the digital part, designers consider the application scenarios of merchants and the visual experience of buyers to make the font look more friendly and acceptable.
Regarding Pratt & Whitney, Yi Guang, head of Alibaba's custom font project, commented:
He is like a 20-year-old boy, young and powerful.
"Puhui" came at a very good time
Some netizens ridiculed, "If you do self-media, if you don't receive the lawyer's letter from Visual China, it means your business is not big enough; if you do design, if you don't receive the lawyer's letter from Founder Type, it means your influence is not enough."
As we all know, the use of images often involves copyright issues. However, the blind spot of more people may be that fonts also have copyright.
The movie "Nine-story Demon Tower" was sentenced to pay 140,000 yuan to the designer of the font because the seven characters appearing in the movie were suspected of copyright infringement. In addition to film and television works, online store operators suffer from fonts, which is even more unbearable.
Picture/"Nine-story Demon Tower" infringing font, source network
According to statistics, Taobao has nearly 700 million monthly active users, about 220,000 Tmall stores, and about 10.3 million Taobao stores. In recent years, on the Alibaba platform, there have also been many incidents where merchants have been sued by font companies for infringing fonts. To change this situation, Alibaba released free commercial fonts.
As Ali's slogan said: "Let the world have no difficult business", free commercial fonts are the epitome of this sentence. It has to be said that free of charge reduces the burden on small and medium businesses.
5 different font weights (thickness and thickness) for pictures/inclusive fonts
Providing a free copyrighted font is a great way to make a good-looking font available to a large community of sellers while raising their copyright awareness.
Talking about the original intention of "inclusive body", Yang Guang, senior director of Alibaba's retail design department, said:
At the beginning of the establishment of the Alibaba font project, we have already thought that this set of fonts will be open to the entire Alibaba ecosystem, and even more people will use it.
This is not the first time Alibaba has made efforts to solve the font copyright issue of merchants. As early as December 2016, Alibaba reached a cooperation with Huakang, another font manufacturer. Taobao merchants can use 45 Huakang fonts for free in Taobao’s product introduction. This time, the set of fonts designed by the joint Hanyi will be expanded to various channels for free, and it is no longer limited to Taobao.
Font is a tool after all
At present, there are several mainstream commercial free fonts on the market, including Siyuan HeiTi, Siyuan Soft HeiTi, Founder Font (HeiTi, ShuSong, FangSong, KaiTi), Zaku Font, Huakang Font, Pangmenzhengdao Title Style, Wenquanyi fonts etc.
Free fonts are very limited, so many companies customize fonts for themselves. The companies mentioned above are good examples.
The picture/upper picture is regular font, and the picture below is Pratt & Whitney
However, it often takes more than 2 years to design a complete set of fonts with a sense of design. After all, in terms of word count alone, a set of Chinese fonts has 20,000 characters.
On Zhihu, a netizen described the process of designing Chinese fonts in this way: "Write it out, scan it into the computer, and then use software to repeatedly adjust the shape. The whole process is very laborious and tedious."
After understanding the workload of font design, probably many people will never complain about paying for commercial fonts.
Pictures/Stills from the movie "Helvetica"
However, on the other side of the payment, there are more "uninformed" people, and it is difficult for them to see the subtle differences between fonts. This is like editing and adjusting a photo. As long as the contrast and saturation are high, it will be an eye-catching photo. Here, to borrow a comment from a netizen on Zhihu: "As long as the difference in fonts 'exists' to designers, then at least it has meaning."
Regardless of the development trend of font design, no matter what fonts Alibaba will launch next, fonts are a tool after all, and their design purpose is to serve the communication media. The merchants on the Ali platform choose which font to use, which is also a consideration.
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