서울시 전용서체 디자인에 관한 연구

Original font is designed with an organization’s image or characteristic implied in the strokes of letters. It is recognized as a new tool to help establishing and maintaining the organization’s identity today. It is common in many companies and cities to establish their identity with Original fonts. However, 2,350 letters should be created for Korean font and environment of creating and using such new fonts became active since 2000. Not only private companies but also public sectors started to develop their Original fonts for city policy. Thus, Seoul City started to develop an Original font in October 2007 as a way of ‘Design Seoul’ policy to make Seoul reborn as a city of beautiful design. As a result, Seoul City presented two types of ‘Seoul Hangang font’, four types of ‘Seoul Namsan font’ and one type of vertical writing font. ‘Seoul font’ was developed in order to manage its own font consistently and arrange city view which is mixed with much different visual information and establish flexible identity in diverse spaces. This project has bee processed by focusing on expressing the image of Seoul in the letter type based on researches about history, environment, and traditionally culture of Seoul and consideration on our nation’s aesthetic sense and identity. In this research, development and use cases of Original fonts by cities and public organizations in Korea and other countries will be reviewed to see the Original font’s function as identification. Moreover, I would introduce the process of academic research and design development for creation of ‘Seoul font’ and seek for element of the Original font to complete and continue the city’s identity and a direction for improvement.