Seed. LINE's Custom Typeface
15 comments
·November 13, 2025Semaphor
For those who are wondering what Line is, it’s a Japanese messenger turned super-app [0]
> 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.
andai
How long did it take to do the Kanji?
hecanjog
I thought the original LINE had made a typeface, bummer. https://www.lineimprint.com/
eptcyka
What is the license situation here?
spiffyk
> All fonts are released under the SIL Open Font License, Version1.1.
> 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.
eptcyka
I searched for the string ”lic”, found nothing. But I’m on a phone.
prodigycorp
You can use it commercially for free. You cannot sell it.
> All content of LINE Seed is copyrighted material owned by LY Corp. All fonts are released under the SIL Open Font License, Version1.1. This license is also available with a FAQ at: https://scripts.sil.org/OFL
> You can use them for any personal or commercial purposes. However, the software font files themselves cannot be sold by the other parties other than LY Corp. For commercial use, we highly recommend to include attribution in product or service.
James_K
I've not a clue what Line is, but their front page contains this gem:
>Listen, Watch and <br>Sing along.
How the hell does that happen in the year of our Lord 2025?
halapro
LINE is super popular in Japan and Thailand, where it's the most common messaging platform (although Instagram is most definitely encroaching on both markets.)
Cthulhu_
There's so much happening in the mobile app space that a lot of westerners aren't aware of, it's kinda crazy when you think about it. Line has 178 million active users across its largest markets (and hundreds of millions of accounts), WeChat has 1.3 billion users (and 3.7 million apps on its platform), QQ has hundreds of millions, etc.
Granted, Facebook apparently has 3 billion active users per month.
rana762
[dead]
wartywhoa23
Sorry, it's just yet another faceless and generic font like 100s of others...
As someone who regularly works with Japanese and Thai, I'm very excited about this, given it has English, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Taiwanese as its basic set. Thai itself is complex to layout[^a], and it can be very hard to find a matching typeface. I guess LINE has this problem too, given the app is popular in both Japan and Thailand.
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.