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.