Introducing TikTok Sans: From brand font to open-source ​type system

In collaboration, TN staff, partner Contrast Foundry, and engineer Aaron Bell added a width axis, improved Greek and Cyrillic, and optimized fonts for performance across platforms. Notably, TikTok made the uncommon decision to open-source the final type family—providing a versatile, high-quality, variable font to everyone.

To keep pace with its growth, TikTok needed a versatile and robust typographic system. In 2023, TikTok switched from their existing type palette to their own, custom TikTok Sans, designed in collaboration with Swiss foundry Grilli Type. The new typeface replaced TikTok’s mix of fonts, unifying the app and marketing under a consistent look. TikTok Sans was designed to reflect the platform’s personality—playful yet clear—with bigger openings and cleaner shapes, resulting in better legibility.

TikTok launched the typeface in the app and across branding across a range of three scripts: Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, with weight, slant, optical size, and other generated variable axes​. After the launch, the TikTok team demanded even more precision, variability, and testing. To answer their needs, TikTok turned to Type Network for technical expertise, design excellence, and open-sourcing experience.

TN assembled a team of partner designers and engineers to work alongside our staff. The goal was to solve the technical challenges while preserving TikTok’s unique identity. Working closely with TikTok’s design team—which takes a thoroughly data-driven approach—TN delivered in rapid review intervals. This dialogue meant TikTok could test iterations of the font in production environments and give feedback in real-time, ensuring measurable progress towards their business goals.

—Maria Doreuli, Contrast Foundry

As the collaboration progressed, the two teams discovered the need to expand TikTok Sans’s width range, accommodating buttons, calls-to-action, fine print, advertising, and a myriad other typesetting needs. To accomplish this, we brought on TN partner Contrast Foundry to draw new masters.

To add a width axis that would allow the letters to compress or expand for different design needs, Contrast Foundry’s designers Maria Doreuli and Krista Radoeva drew four new masters at the typeface’s Display optical size—Display Condensed Light, Display Condensed Black, Display Expanded Light, and Display Expanded Black—giving TikTok Sans much wider and narrower options than before.

Rather than drawing all the missing masters at once (including Text masters), TN and Contrast Foundry took a “sparse-masters” approach. This meant drawing one master at a time, thoroughly testing how the typeface’s “safe range” grew, then strategically deciding which master to add next. This approach allowed the team to keep the file size down while maintaining focus on TikTok’s emerging needs.

The slant axis, which had been generated completely with custom scripts, posed another opportunity to reduce file size and add precision. While most of the scripted results were acceptable, there were numerous forms which lacked refinement and quality. To fix this, TN developed a method by which the typeface uses a mix of generated forms and manually drawn glyphs, giving us full control over the results without increasing the file size.

Sparse masters for the width axis and sparse glyphs for the slant axis offered substantial benefits: High quality and robust axes without ballooning the file size.

To ensure consistency across scripts, designers at Contrast Foundry refined the Greek and Cyrillic characters already present in TikTok Sans. Nuanced adjustments helped align the tone, proportions, and optical polish of the non-Latin characters with the rest of the typeface. The subtle improvements enhanced clarity and cohesion across the super family.

—Maria Doreuli, Contrast Foundry

Creating a beautiful, functional font isn’t just about drawing letters. The design requires technical finesse so that the font renders crisply on various screens. Hinting prepares a font for the multiplicity of devices the users of platforms like TikTok use—telling the font how to display cleanly at small sizes or on low-resolution devices.

Hinting a variable font poses a challenge, only increased with open-source distribution. To tackle this, Type Network partnered with hinting expert Aaron Bell, who has worked with the company on several large projects. Bell scripted instructions to align strokes to pixel grids and prevent blur or distortion at tiny sizes, ensuring sharpness and readability at every size.

Hinting a variable font (which can morph into countless weight and width combinations) is a complex assignment, but Bell achieved a clarity that users can see for themselves.

—Lucas Czarnecki, creative director, Type Network

Perhaps more remarkable than the typeface itself is TikTok’s decision to open-source it. TikTok is making TikTok Sans available to everyone through Google Fonts, inviting the world to use and even contribute to their signature font.

Type Network, which helped Canonical with their open-source Ubuntu typeface, was prepared for the task. Director of technology Guido Ferreyra, who led production for the entire project, made the final refinements.

The build of TikTok Sans was carefully optimized.

• Unnecessary data was trimmed
• New width masters were integrated—resulting in a smaller file size
• Increased capability: Variable widths, weights, optical sizes, slants, native Greek and Cyrillic, etc.)

—Guido Ferreyra, technology director, Type Network

The work on TikTok Sans brought together a wide network of collaborators: TN partners and staff, including native-speaking designers, technical engineers, hinting specialists, as well as TikTok’s own teams.

TikTok Sans is not only a valuable tool for a brand, but also a resource for the global design community. By choosing to open-source the design and fonts, TikTok has shown how investing in great type—and sharing it freely—can unleash a wealth of creative possibilities.