InspireTWDC

InspireTWDC is the official typeface for the Walt Disney Company. The font was engineered to be versatile for today’s uses from prints to apps. Currently covering 80+ Latin-based languages in 5 weights, it is continued to be improved and expanded to cover more styles and languages.

 
 

A Search For One Disney Font

Looking at Disney, we implemented a variety of typefaces on our guest-facing media depending on art directions, the budget, and the character set coverage we need. It’s time that we come together and establish a font that could unify the typography of the Walt Disney Company. 

In recent years, many companies have decided to build their own font rather than licensing a 3rd-party font. Their reasons to invest in a font creation include brandability, freedom of usage, and long-term cost-savings. And even though the trend of typeface design is going in the same direction, there are ways to add subtle characteristics to make the typeface their own.

 
 
 

Audit

We looked at the fonts that we have used or have some kind of licensing or ownership. The three that we chose to analyze are Avenir, Matterhorn, and Curiosity. Avenir is a high-quality font we license from Monotype and paid annual fee to use on many of our websites. Matterhorn is the font that was custom made for Disneystore.com in 2012. We have a full ownership to it but was decommissioned because of change in art direction and rendering quality. And Curiosity is the font that Disney has licensed for us which covers unlimited use and has been pushed to all Disney computers.

The copyright of the font is owned by the company Fontworks. While these three are all san serif fonts, they have certain distinctive details such as the roundness of the skeleton, the branching, and the terminals. And Curiosity is the font that Disney has licensed for us which covers unlimited use and has been pushed to all Disney computers. The copyright of the font is owned by the company Fontworks. While these three are all san serif fonts, they have certain distinctive details such as the roundness of the skeleton, the branching, and the terminals.