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In the digital era, font design has new technical support, which may bring more changes in user experience and create more new opportunities. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, H&M and other companies have customized brand fonts worldwide. Today, we share the full record of the customized font of the "Jingdong Lang Zhengti" brand customized by Jingdong Design Center.

1、 Why JD launched brand fonts

Type defines type. In English, the word Type contains two meanings, word and type. This explains the meaning of fonts for brands from a certain perspective. A font can affect or even determine people's perception of the brand style. With the continuous expansion of product use scenarios, the presentation of a brand is no longer limited to a simple LOGO.

Brands can connect with audiences through LOGO, brand color, IP image, font and other ways. According to a survey conducted by Salesforce, an authoritative organization, in April this year, 75% of consumers expect a continuous and consistent experience when interacting with brands.

Looking at the current brand spectrum of JD, we can see that we were indeed in the absence of fonts before. As a widely distributed medium, font will become an important tool to connect all potential brand contacts.

Therefore, the launch of JD Lang Orthodox will work with our existing resources to comprehensively improve the consistency of JD's brand experience and help build a new brand ecology.

2、 Mysterious organization, hard exploration of self-sufficiency

Jingdong Lang Zhengti is actually derived from what the internal design team of Jingdong calls "Jingdong font". Similar to many brands (IBM, Ogilvy), our brand fonts also extend from our LOGO text.

At the beginning, we also learned while doing. Through some basic font design knowledge, we summarized some stroke rules from the few strokes in the LOGO, such as horizontal thin, vertical thick, point flat, sharp fold, etc., and then applied them to the needs of various departments. In addition, sometimes it is necessary to review the text LOGO submitted by other departments.

But gradually, we began to feel powerless. On the one hand, with the continuous expansion of JD's business, more and more people want to design JD fonts as LOGOs. The use of JD font as a symbol has the advantage of strong brand endorsement. Compared with the design of a graphic logo or even a set of VI system, the use of JD font saves more time and has higher promotion benefits. However, it is still a bit overwhelmed to rely on only one designer to meet the needs of many departments of the whole group.

On the other hand, we realized that the rules of character creation we formulated according to LOGO fonts are actually very vague and limited, which is also caused by our lack of experience in font library design. Such vulnerabilities make us encounter problems in practical applications. For example, at the beginning, we simply stipulated that the pen ending for skimming is vertical cutting, but in some words, the use of cross cutting pen ending is more comfortable visually.

Later, after communicating with professional font designers, we learned that this is because in Chinese characters, a single stroke can be divided into many types, such as left-handed, oblique, curved, and straight. Simply applying one rule to all strokes will cause some structural imbalances.

3、 Founder delivery, professional output

Just when the word making project of JD font fell into trouble, the Marketing Department just found us and proposed a plan to cooperate with professional font library companies to customize JD brand fonts, so as to promote brand upgrading. We agreed with the Marketing Department and confirmed the cooperation with Founder. As a result, the main creative force of the whole font library has shifted to Founder, and we mainly take the helm. The production of the whole font library has also started to develop towards specialization, scale and systematization, and the production speed has shown explosive growth.

First of all, we worked with Founder's teacher to determine the overall tone of the font, hoping to keep it simple, direct and powerful. After analyzing the existing materials, Founder's team readjusted the stroke, face, center of gravity and structure of the font, especially standardized the proportion and rules of stroke thickness.

It can be seen that after the vertical and horizontal stroke ratio of the new font is reduced from 20:11 to 3:2, the white distribution of the text becomes more uniform, and the recognition degree is also significantly improved.

At the same time, the reclassification of stroke rules by Founder's team also solved the problems we had encountered before. For example, it is stipulated that the pen ending of point, skim, stamp and mirror point stamp shall adopt transverse cutting, while the pen ending of flat stamp and mirror point stamp shall adopt longitudinal cutting.

After clarifying the rules, the Founder team first conducted a small-scale pilot project and created 130 characters, which covered the commonly used characters in Jingdong, as well as the main radicals and some unique characters in Chinese. At the same time, Founder also invited us to provide comments on these words.

From this, we started a contest to find fault with fonts. We enlarged these words, printed them, and pasted them on the wall. Look closely, look far, sit, stand, kneel, walk, mobilize our most primitive design intuition, try to find out the unnatural places in these words, and then paste the post it notes. Later, we even became obsessed with words.

4、 Both sides of the seesaw - professional opinions and business needs

In this project cooperation, Founder team sent two heavyweight design experts, Mr. Qiu Yin, the design director of Founder font, and Mr. Wang Wen, the deputy design director. (With such profound experience in font design, we can't help but call the teacher directly)

At the beginning, we were worried that we would be passive in the project process and could not participate in the discussion of font design well. After all, by contrast, we are simply a small white font, lacking systematic font design knowledge and experience in building a large font library. However, in the process of cooperation, we gradually realized that design is still interlinked from a certain perspective.

In the words of Phase I and Phase II, we put forward adjustment suggestions for some basic structures according to the "design intuition", and even tried to modify them directly, because it felt more intuitive to discuss this way. This has indeed been recognized and echoed by Founder teachers, including some more important radicals.

For example, at the two points beside the vertical center and the fire letter, the teachers made them very thin at the beginning. This may be because in the initial tonal setting of the pen, it is stipulated that there should be no radian from the beginning to the end of the pen. The teachers may have become small for the sake of leaving the words blank. However, we thought that they were too "cute" in general, so we made them bold and moved closer to the center. The teacher also adopted our suggestions, and both parties were satisfied with the presentation of the final draft.

After confirming the core characters, Founder began to further and rapidly expand the font library. Although the whole font production time is only 3 months, it is still relatively smooth and orderly.

Among them, there is another role that cannot be ignored, that is, the Marketing Department. As the brand resource relay station of the whole group, the Marketing Department is responsible for undertaking the design needs of various departments for a long time, and has a strong voice in the actual application effect of fonts in the front line of business. As a result, Founder and the Marketing Department naturally fell on both sides of the seesaw, while we stood in the middle, we should not only trust both sides, but also balance their opinions, and promote the rapid and high-quality production of the font.

During this production interval, the brand release of "JD Health", a new business segment, happened to happen. Therefore, the Founder team needs to make the standard characters of these words temporarily. We have spent a lot of time on the word Kang.

The Marketing Department believes that the "Kang" character design given by Founder is unstable. This may be caused by too high and too short pen stamping in the lower right corner of Kang character. This is understandable, because when it comes to JD Health's business scope and the brand tonality it hopes to convey, the business side naturally hopes to reflect a sense of stability and security on the font signs.

However, the suggestions put forward by the business side are still lacking in design and do not form a system with other fonts. Therefore, on this basis, we provided some suggestions for Mr. Founder to modify the direction, that is, to make the folding closer to the ground, and the two points on the left should also be adjusted accordingly.

Founder side made further innovation and modification according to our opinions. We selected from the perspective of combination of design and business needs, and thought that the point on the right can be separated from the pressing, and the pen can be pressed to obtain greater stretch space, and the whole character can also "stand more steadily", so we chose Scheme C. This episode was successfully solved.

5、 Whose font? Our fonts

From the name, it seems that the brand customized font has natural specificity, and it only belongs to the brand of its service. But as Mona said in the 2020 font design trend report, the brand's font strategy should not be fixed and rigid, but more like an extensible and changeable tool, helping us to reshape the brand in real time. This means that Jingdong Langzheng will continue to evolve and become more open in the future. It is not just the font of JD, but also the font of all of us. It tries to meet the needs of designers, partners, consumers and other parties.

At present, Jingdong Lang's authentic style is only one word heavy and relatively thick, which is mainly applicable to large titles or signs, and cannot meet the needs of many text content styles at present. In the future, we will make more font families with heavy characters and rich Jingdong Langzheng font. We also do not rule out Jingdong Lang's plan to cover more languages. After all, JD, as a global brand, will be exposed more and more in various countries. It is also important to use fonts to maintain brand consistency in different contexts.

In addition, Variable Font may be a further development direction for us. Variable font is characterized by its infinity. Just download a set of fonts that support this technology, and you can directly adjust various shape parameters of characters, including weight, width, serif, slope, etc.

This can not only reduce the work of font designers, but also provide more possibilities for designers who use fonts. At the same time, it also helps to eliminate the barriers of font interpretation in various electronic terminals and release more brand vitality. At present, we are communicating with the partners of the technology platform about the implementation process of this plan.

In terms of the scope of use, JD Lang Orthodox has opened its authorization to all cooperative businesses and institutions. We also hope to strengthen the relationship with partners with the help of brand fonts, so that this brand symbol can provide more space for partners to show, and further expand the breadth of brand ecology.

The person in charge of Lippincott, a brand strategy company, said: "In this new era, fonts are more necessary and more likely to unify people's experience of brands than ever before, and achieve seamless connection on all channels and carriers."

This time, we do the brand font of JD, certainly not to "catch up with the trend". It is based on the needs of the real environment. Jingdong is fundamentally a platform for providing retail infrastructure services. This service is both hardware based, such as storing and delivering packages, and software based, processing and distributing information. And text, as one of the important carriers of information, is the starting point and opportunity we seize in this attempt to create design value for JD.

The process of growing up together with Jingdong Lang Zhengti includes our ignorant exploration in the systematic font design, the collision of ideas with cross-border designers, and even the imagination of the future development of Jingdong brand fonts, which is a mixture of bitterness and happiness.

Let's look forward to the performance of Jingdong Langzheng.