Seed. LINE's Custom Typeface
Mood
supportive
Sentiment
positive
Category
culture
Key topics
typography
design
branding
LINE, a popular messaging app, has released its custom typeface, Seed, which is designed to be highly legible and versatile.
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Very active discussionFirst comment
2h
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- 01Story posted
11/13/2025, 9:36:51 AM
6d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
11/13/2025, 11:23:54 AM
2h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
46 comments in Day 1
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Step 03 - 04Latest activity
11/14/2025, 4:44:36 PM
4d ago
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> Line became Japan's largest social network in 2013 and is used by over 70% of the population as of 2023; it is also popular mainly in Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand.
The font looks decent, nice of them to have it under the SIL Open Font License.
Obviously many in this community see that as a generally bad thing(me included) but the wide audience of none-tech people clearly gravitate very strongly towards it.
I throw it on the pile for evidence of “meaningful friction”, a concept that someone else has definitely already coined: that “some degree of friction or restriction brings positive benefits for things like art or community compared to unlimited easy access. For example very small data limits creating unique art or music in early game bit products.”
Quick research indicates that Jerry Hirshburg has coined it Creative Abrasion and MARTIN WEIGEL has blogged about it, but neither specifically bring the idea to the concept of communities.
I believe this is the result of the current world leaders' agenda to close down and isolate countries and make as much chaos as possible by stirring local nationalism, setting up nations against nations, impeding international communication, perpetrating local atrocities while the rest of the world stands aside indifferent or doesn't even know the full extent of those, etc. And this scattered world will still be owned and milked by global entities, that's where the hypocrisy is.
If anyone's been living under the rock, I recommend that they check the news - too many rabbid talking heads are in a runaway warmongering mode now and have moved the Overton window enough to say in all seriousness that war between Europe and Russia, USA and China is not just possible, but inevitable!
* Apple developer program is $99/year everywhere and making iOS apps without a Mac used to be impossible and is still difficult, so naturally there's more demand for miniapp platforms like WeChat and LINE in countries with way lower purchasing parity. LINE miniapps are booming now that the yen is so weak. But the West doesn't have this issue.
* Superapps typically grow out of chat and payment platforms and Apple owns such a massive share of that in the West. They're not going to build miniapps into Apple Messages or Apple Pay.
If you fill a few urban core skyscrapers to the brim with bunch of STEM/CS/CE uni grad kids, they'll start stuffing anything they are allowed to touch with super futuristic string theory thing for absolutely no reason. Someone's going to implement crypto mining feature on the live app. Others start doing LLMs working together with image generation teams while the image creation team with a quirky boss will have their own. That's how superapp gets created.
Also, Google is an American company, unless I'm grossly mistaken. You guys have a superapp and a superapp company already.
>Listen, Watch and <br>Sing along.
How the hell does that happen in the year of our Lord 2025?
Granted, Facebook apparently has 3 billion active users per month.
> This license is also available with a FAQ at: https://scripts.sil.org/OFL
You get this by clicking the "LINE Seed LICENSE" link at the bottom. Unfortunately just a JavaScript popup, so can't be direct-linked.
It is, however, a bit unfortunate that this is yet another unlooped Thai typeface[1]. Loopless is impossible to read as a body text for people above thirty. Historically, IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped[2] was pretty much the only open-source stylized Thai font that is looped (not including the standard Tlwg set). I remembered that Noto Sans Thai[3] used to be looped, but they switched to a loopless version at one point. Thankfully they've (re?)introduced the looped version[4] in recent years.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typography#Looped_vs_loop...
[2]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans+Thai+Looped
[3]: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai
[4]: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai+Looped
[^a]: Since Thai text typically requires another ascent level above cap height and ascender, and another level under descender for tone markers and vowels, on iOS, if you add Thai as one of the phone languages, iOS will apply a 1.2x line height modifier to all text in the system, either by expanding line-height when allowed, or shrinking the font size.
Creating language-specific fonts that can be just forced everywhere to eliminate random pieces from other languages solves this problem. At least everything will be consistent.
I've never dealt with those precisely but I have had to typeset documents containing both latin and greek or cyrillic (but luckily not all three) and even with that there are not very many fonts that support both, and even fewer that are a good font with both. You end up having to mix fonts, and finding ones that look good together with the same letter spacing and line height and consistent weight is quite a challenge!
I'm definitely aware of the trend of every tech company commissioning a near identical just-slightly-quirky sans serif font for no clear reason but this doesn't seem to be that.
Everything comes back in fashion again.
If you're going to pay a foundry to create a custom face, why wouldn't you make it distinctive enough to feel "yours?" It's like having one of the world's top architects make a near-exact copy of a suburban tract home.
Open Dyslexic: https://opendyslexic.org Using this font will make you brain look at similarly shaped sans serifs in strange ways. You can configure Claude Web to use this font.
Atkinson Hyperlegible: https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/ Pushing aging eyes with smaller display fonts in the terminal. I found the Braille Institute’s Atkinson Hyperlegible to have very good readability in small sizes.
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