SST®

Universelle et intemporelle.

Designers

  • Akira Kobayashi

Fonderie

  • Studio Monotype

About SST

For international brands, SST brings harmony and personality to communications across cultures and touchpoints. The SST typeface was designed to be universal and timeless, with support for 93 languages and outstanding legibility at all sizes.

Monotype’s Akira Kobayashi and Sony Creative Center’s Hiroshige Fukuhara created a hybrid of two typographic styles, geometric and humanist. A sharp, solid, geometric edge is evident in uniform line widths – tempered here and there with just a few tiny optical adjustments – and balanced by softer, more organic qualities of humanist design to improve readability at all sizes.

A team of ten other type designers around the world helped to make sure the style demands and cultural nuances of specific languages were catered for, and ensure a consistent tone across the entire family of fonts. Today, any brand or designer can access SST’s blend of legibility, versatility and timelessness. ‘Carelessly embellish a typeface with trendy styling, and in two or three years it will look outdated,’ says Akira. ‘We avoided this when designing the SST fonts, which I hope will be used for decades.’

Designers

Akira Kobayashi

Akira Kobayashi

With a background in art and calligraphy, Akira has designed several award-winning typefaces, typically Latin fonts, though he studied and began his type design career in his native Japan. He worked in Japan at Sha-ken, Jiyu-kobo, TypeBank and taught at Nihon Designer Gakuin before becoming Monotype’s Type Director in Germany. In addition to designing retail fonts, Akira has led important custom font projects for Sony and UBS.

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SST: une police universelle

La police SST s’attaque à un défi central de l’image de marque - l’universalité. La superfamille SST prend en charge plus de 90 langues, notamment le japonais, le thaï et l’arabe.

Une police, 93 langues : le défi d’une création pour Sony

Le directeur typographe Akira Kobayashi a étroitement collaboré avec le directeur artistique en chef de Sony, Hiroshige Fukuhara, pour créer une police originale couvrant une centaine de langues environ.