Michelle Devlin
Noto, Source Han & Plex

Noto, Source Han & Plex: The language of America's Korean fonts

Abstract:
In short, this is writing about writing.

This research’s three case studies developed through Writing as Practice—a project-defined methodology of critical analysis—interrogate digital marketing, such as blog posts and websites, published by United States-based technology-oriented companies such as Google, Adobe and IBM also known as ‘big tech.’ Each case study assesses the potentially negative social, political and economic effects of using typed English as a language material to visually and textually homogenize scripts from around the world. The visual homogenization of as many languages as possible, or multilingual font design, persists due the desire of ‘big tech’ to globalize their company brand through graphic design tools geared towards textually dominating our current techno-capitalist society. Tools for exerting Euro-American-centric design values include terms such as ‘CJK,’ ‘Pan-CJK,’ or ‘East Asian.’ The decolonization of such terminology can begin through multiple, iterative visual-textual experiments. Critical analyses of the digital marketing language of Korean fonts, specifically Noto ‘Sans’ KR, Source Han ‘Sans’ KR, Plex ‘Sans’ KR, begin to decolonize terms such as ‘CJK’ by plucking out a single strand of the pervasive ‘Asian’ cultural broad brush. Results of the research show that the methodology: challenges typographic terminology due to how it is designed for questioning conventions within the discipline of font design, draws inspiration across Humanities-oriented research and applies insights gained from experiments to write about ‘big tech’ tools.

Keywords:
Writing as Practice, digital marketing, language, decolonization, Korean fonts

References:
Jeong, Suna. “Noto Project: Between Harmony and Homogeneity.” In Ethics in Design and Communication: Critical Perspectives, edited by Laura Scherling and Andrew DeRose. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020.

Tunstall, Elizabeth Dori. “Decolonizing Design Innovation: Design Anthropology, and Indigenous Knowledge.” In The Social Design Reader, edited by Elizabeth Resnick, 2019.

Bush, Randy. “On Techno-Colonialism.” 2015.

Rendell, Jane. Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011.