How JD Built Its Custom Brand Font: A Design R&D Case Study

1. Why JD Launched a Brand Font

In English, the word “type” means both text and category, underscoring the importance of typography for brand perception. A font can shape how people recognize a brand’s style, especially as brand touchpoints expand beyond a simple logo.

According to a Salesforce survey, 75% of consumers expect a consistent experience across all brand interactions.

JD previously lacked a dedicated typeface; the new font becomes a crucial medium to connect all brand touchpoints.

2. The Early, Self‑Taught Exploration

The internal design team, calling the project “JD Font,” derived the typeface from the LOGO’s few strokes, identifying patterns such as thin horizontals, thick verticals, flat dots, and sharp angles, and applied them to departmental requests.

As demand grew, a single designer could no longer handle the volume of custom‑letter requests, and the initial design rules proved too vague, leading to visual inconsistencies (e.g., differing stroke endings for similar strokes).

Collaboration with professional font designers revealed the complexity of Chinese strokes—multiple variants of a single “pie” stroke—requiring more nuanced rules.

3. Handing Over to Fangzheng for Professional Production

When the internal project stalled, the marketing department proposed a partnership with the professional type‑foundry Fangzheng. JD retained a steering role while Fangzheng took charge of the core production, accelerating the workflow.

Fangzheng refined the overall tone to stay simple, direct, and powerful, standardising stroke thickness, weight ratios, and structural balance. The new font’s vertical‑to‑horizontal stroke ratio changed from 20:11 to 3:2, improving uniformity and legibility.

Rule revisions included using horizontal cuts for dots, pies, and mirrored pies, while flatter strokes used vertical cuts, solving earlier visual imbalance.

A pilot of 130 characters—covering common JD characters, major radicals, and unique glyphs—was created, then examined intensively (the “font‑spotting contest”) to identify any unnatural details.

4. Balancing Professional Input and Business Needs

Fangzheng’s design director and deputy director worked closely with JD, incorporating JD’s intuition‑driven feedback on structures and radicals. Adjustments such as thickening the vertical‑heart and fire radicals were accepted, leading to a mutually satisfactory final version.

The project, completed in three months, proceeded smoothly, with the marketing team acting as the brand‑resource hub, mediating between the design team and business requirements.

For the new JD Health brand, specific character tweaks (e.g., stabilising the “Kang” glyph) were made to convey safety and reliability.

5. Who Owns the Font? The Future of JD’s Typeface

Custom brand fonts are not static; they should be extensible tools that evolve with the brand. JD’s “Langzheng” typeface will continue to grow, adding more weights, possibly supporting additional languages, and exploring variable‑font technology that allows on‑the‑fly adjustment of weight, width, slant, and other parameters.

The font is already licensed to partners, strengthening brand cohesion across collaborations.

According to Lippincott, a modern font can unify brand experiences across all channels, making typography a strategic asset.

Conclusion

JD’s font project illustrates a transition from ad‑hoc internal design to systematic, professional type‑foundry collaboration, highlighting the challenges of scaling Chinese typography, the importance of clear design rules, and the strategic role of a custom typeface in brand identity.