Rakuten Announces New Global Font Designs

- Font showcase page: https://global.rakuten.com/corp/design/rakuten-font/

Tokyo, July 2, 2020 – Rakuten, Inc. has developed a new set of global fonts for use across the company’s websites, apps, materials and other content. The new fonts will be rolled out to Rakuten Group services in Japan and around the world, for both internal and external use. Rakuten also unveiled a dedicated font showcase page today that introduces the characteristics and personality crafted into the new fonts.

Rakuten shares a wide range of messages with users and society through its services and partnerships. As a global innovation leader offering more than 70 different services, including e-commerce, fintech, digital content and communications, Rakuten has also partnered with internationally renowned sports teams and tournaments such as FC Barcelona, the Golden State Warriors and the Davis Cup. In June 2018, the company announced its global brand logo renewal^*1, unifying and strengthening its domestic and international brands to prepare for the next stage of global growth. Building on this momentum, Rakuten has developed this new set of fonts to express the diversity and uniqueness of its various services and other offerings, while maintaining a sense of consistency with existing brand assets.

Kashiwa Sato, Rakuten Chief Creative Director, who directed the font development, commented, “Fonts express the brand of the business; they are an extremely important asset. We have developed four new font styles inspired by the form of the Rakuten logo. By selecting the font style that is best suited to the message, our range of brand expression expands, enabling us to deliver our message more effectively to users.”

Bruno Maag, Chairman of the London-based typeface design studio Dalton Maag, which has developed fonts for many well-known international brands and businesses to date and supported the development of these new fonts, commented, “We were delighted to work with Rakuten on the creation of a new custom font family. The four distinct styles truly capture the diversity of Rakuten, and offer a range of expressions for different messages and applications. We look forward to seeing the typeface supporting Rakuten's future business activities.”  

Rakuten will continue to enhance its group brand value worldwide by developing a range of brand assets and strengthening its branding efforts, at the same time as it endeavors to empower people through innovation to improve their lives and to offer greater levels of convenience to customers.

Based on the form of the Rakuten logo, the default Rakuten Sans font was specifically designed so that it maintains a high level of discernibility and readability even when the font size is very small.

The new font family was developed with a total of four type styles and five weights (letter thickness), comprised of Rakuten Sans, Rakuten Serif for expressing elegance, Rakuten Rounded for expressing fun and playfulness, and Rakuten Condensed for impact and robustness. The new fonts can be used for a total of 16 languages^*2 including English, French, Spanish and German. The font showcase page unveiled today includes a detailed explanation about the new fonts, as well as a video of a fireside chat with Kashiwa Sato, Rakuten Chief Creative Director, and Bruno Maag, Chairman at Dalton Maag.

Font showcase page: https://global.rakuten.com/corp/design/rakuten-font/

*1 https://global.rakuten.com/corp/news/press/2018/0626_01.html
*2 Applicable languages are as follows:
English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Romanian, Dutch, Catalan, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian (Bokmål + Nynorsk), Welsh, Luxembourgish, Icelandic