AWARD YEAR
2017
CATEGORY
Work
GOALS
Decent Work & Economic Growth
KEYWORDS
fonts, glyphs
COUNTRY
United States of America
DESIGNED BY
Bob Jung
WEBSITE
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/meet-noto-googles-free-font-800-languages/
Noto
A free font for more than 800 languages.
Noto stands for 'No More Tofu' and solves a big usability issue that most people don’t know exists. If you write in languages like English, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, or Russian, for example, you rarely see what is called 'tofu' (when your computer or phone can’t display a font: A blank rectangular box pops up). Such languages are supported by Unicode, the consortium that approves emoji and maintains software internationalization standards, and your devices come with them.
But people read and write in hundreds of languages. Unicode only recently approved Tibetan. Ditto Armenian. Many more await approval. If these less common languages have a digital typeface, it’s probably not well considered, because certain regions of the world have much more rich typographic traditions than others.