LG Electronics commissioned us to revise, extend, and improve Miso and Museo Sans, the fonts they had been using for their operating system WebOS. We worked closely with their developers to optimize the fonts across all of their platforms.

About WebOS fonts for LG

We were asked by LG Electronics to revise, extend, and improve the fonts they had been using for their operating system, WebOS. The visual style was built on three components, Museo Sans by Jos Buivenga, Miso by Mårten Nettelbladt, and LG’s in-house icon font. The commission presented us with a rare opportunity to collaborate closely with their developers as we were optimising the fonts across all of their platforms. LG’s WebOS was developed for smart TVs and other devices that address multi-channel and multi-platform media consumption. Achieving a good interface legibility is key, but it can be challenging. The pixelated texts are typically viewed from a distance, sometimes at an angle. This requires simple and well-articulated shapes, as well as careful screen optimisation. Moreover, the global market requires the fonts to have a wide language support.

We started by revising the contours of Miso and the icons. For the next step, we corrected and harmonized accents in Museo Sans. However, our main task was to extend the language support. Museo and Miso were to support Chinese (via Pinyin transliteration), Polish, Serbian, Vietnamese, and Hausa. On top of that, Miso needed to be extended for more Central European languages and Turkish. Diacritical marks are essential for correct representation of these languages. We made sure that all were designed to the highest standard and with regional preferences in mind. The final step was the optimisation for web and screen usage through hinting, to ensure legibility across the board.

Credits

Leads

Anna Štepanovská Design
Anna Štepanovská (née Giedryś) is a type and graphic designer based in Brno, Czechia. She holds a Master of Arts in graphic design and visual communication from the Sign and Typography Studio at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, but she first fell in love with calligraphy and lettering while on exchange at Vilnius Fine Arts Academy. She’s been drawing type ever since, and now channels this passion into working on custom and retail fonts at Rosetta. Here, Anna is also responsible for the marketing and presentation of our fonts and played a key role in the development of the company since its early days. In 2011–2013, she was a co-organizer of the international TypeTalks conferences and TypeShorts meetings.
 
Sláva Jevčinová Design, hinting
Sláva Jevčinová is a type and graphic designer from Slovakia. She holds an MA in type design from the Type and Media programme at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague as well as an MA in graphic design from J. E. Purkyně University in Czech Republic. After an internship at Mota Italic in Berlin she specialised in TrueType hinting at Fontwerk. She has been working independently since 2013 and regularly collaborates with Rosetta as hinting specialist and type designer.
 
David Březina Production and font engineering
David Březina is the managing director at Rosetta. While you may know him as the designer of the award-winning type family Skolar, he has also worked on custom typefaces for Adobe, Linotype (Monotype), Microsoft, Google, and others. So far, he has designed typefaces for Cyrillic, Greek, Gujarati, Devanagari, and various extensions of Latin. David holds a Master’s degree in computer science from Masaryk University in Brno (Czechia) and an MA in Typeface Design and PhD from the University of Reading (UK). His cross-disciplinary PhD thesis studied visual similarity and coherence of characters in typefaces for continuous reading in Latin, Cyrillic, and Devanagari scripts. He has also been actively involved in writing, presenting, and conducting workshops on type and typography around the world.