There’s a lot of people who want to access these products. It’s interesting that this American company is now designing these fonts and typefaces for an Asian audience. But, I mean, that’s kind of the mission right? The mission is, they want to categorize all the world’s information and blah, blah, blah. We all know that Google is trying to take over the world, right? I mean, I say that tongue-in-cheek. Well, and that actually gets to sort of an interesting part of this.

Ryssdal: Right, it’s respect for that audience. That you didn’t just sort of, you know, convert something made for a Chinese audience to Korean. And then, you know, what is really cool is that as a designer or developer who, when you really care about your product, you get to show users in different countries that you are thinking of them. So you have this fidelity across products. So you don’t have that when you have access to fonts like these. He refers to that as the “ransom note effect.” So, you know, that kind of schizophrenic, jumbled look. And Bob Jung at Google, he handles their internationalization efforts. Or, if you have a need to use different languages in one screen or on one product, they kind of get jumbled. You wanted it to have a feel you choose another typeface it might lose that feel.

And when you do that, you forfeit this look you’ve created. Before this existed, the only option that you would have is if you want to make your magazine available for readers in another country, you have to choose a totally different typeface. And when you have an international audience, you have people who need to create products across different languages.

Margaret Rhodes: This is important to them because Google has an international audience. Why is a consistent font or typeset important to them? Kai Ryssdal: Google and Adobe worked together for years on this project.

An edited transcript of their conversation is below. Margaret Rhodes, staff writer for Wired magazine who covers design, reported on what makes the Noto serif CJK an accomplishment. She spoke with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal about the font. The Noto serif CJK is the second such font to emerge from the Google/Adobe partnership, and it could have big implications for web designers the world over. Earlier this month, Google and Adobe released something that might just make the world a bit more, well, Google-able: a brand new font that manages to make a consistent typeface for Chinese, Korean and Japanese scripts.

Chinese style font for google docs