How 58UXD Created the ‘Light Breeze’ Typeface: A Design Journey

Font design is a daily presence in our lives, and the FontWork team at 58UXD launched the first Chinese design font "Smile Font" in May 2021, later embarking on a new challenge to create a distinctive sans‑serif typeface with unique personality.

Natural Stretch

The basic proportion of the typeface is set to a slightly wide 23:22 ratio, giving the characters a natural, relaxed feel with a spacious central area and balanced layout.

Connection Meaning

Modern black‑type fonts are widely used for screens, yet handwritten forms still hold a place in daily writing. The design explores merging handwritten stroke connections with the clean geometry of black‑type, creating a subtle link between tradition and modernity.

Flowing Energy

After establishing the "connection" concept, additional stroke connections were introduced, such as wave‑like links for the inverted eight head, crossing strokes for diagonal lines, and curved turns that suggest a flowing current through the characters.

Rigidity and Softness

Curved connections were added between otherwise straight strokes, preserving natural corner angles and introducing subtle round corners, resulting in a harmonious balance of firmness and flexibility.

Ancient New

Traditional calligraphic details—such as the bamboo‑like "绞丝旁" and the split strokes of characters like "的"—were incorporated to give the typeface a subtle historic flavor while maintaining modern readability.

East‑West Fusion

Design extended to Latin letters and numbers, ensuring consistent width‑height ratios and structural features with the Chinese characters, resulting in a cohesive multilingual type family.

Visible and Hidden

In large‑size headings, the intricate stroke details become visible, conveying a sense of personality, while at smaller text sizes the details are concealed, preserving legibility and a clean reading experience.

Design Projects Using Light Breeze

The typeface has already been applied in various internal projects for titles and body text, demonstrating its versatility across different design contexts.

Design Process Steps

The project followed a collaborative workflow: consensus on tools, first use of Glyphs for direct font creation, systematic component classification with 592 smart parts, Python scripts to merge over 20 files in seconds, extensive unified refinement of weight, gray level, center, and spacing, internal testing with kerning adjustments, and final release preparations including posters, manuals, videos, and a documentary.

Thanks

Special thanks to the team members, directors, animators, and all contributors who helped bring the Light Breeze typeface from concept to reality.