By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
TikTok is introducing its own custom font, called TikTok Sans. The font is optimized for “legibility and reading retention” and is supported in many languages from the jump, according to a blog post. Previously, TikTok used Proxima Nova.
TikTok says the TikTok Sans letters have “bigger openings and clearer strokes, making them much easier to distinguish from one another” as well as “slicker and simpler shapes, enabling better recognizability and reliability across languages.” The new font is a bit bigger “and overall line height has been increased to improve readability.” You’ll see the new font first in languages including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Indonesian, Turkish, and Vietnamese, with “plans to add more in the future.”
TikTok has also introduced anti-spoofing features into TikTok Sans, like swapping in a zero with a line through it. Twitter’s recently revised font has similar anti-spoofing changes.
In designing its own font, TikTok joins the many other tech companies that have done the same. Apple is famous for its custom San Francisco font, of course, but Google, Netflix, Instagram, and even Goldman Sachs have their own fonts, too.
“Designed to reflect our diverse community of creators, visionaries, and storytellers, TikTok Sans complements the personality of our platform – from our roots in entertainment to inclusivity and self-expression,” TikTok said in its blog post. The new TikTok Sans font is rolling out globally, so you might already have it.
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