HS Hwalgong Myeongjo
HS Hwalgong Myeongjo (HS활공명조) is a beautifully designed free Korean font that pays homage to the Korean book typography. The design takes its skeletal cues from 1970s-era Korean book typography, specifically the kind you find in old literary publications, where consonant strokes bend sharply at the joints, weight sits high in the letterform, and strokes extend with confident reach. What makes this font unique is that it doesn’t soften those angular corners the way most contemporary mincho or Myeongjo typefaces do. The stroke intersections are kept crisp and square — and yet, by adding serifs to those same sharp edges, and by equalizing the horizontal and vertical stroke weights, the result reads unmistakably as a serif rather than a sans. For the Latin characters, it’s what you called as the slab serif style.
With the unique and sharp angular corners throughout the characters, it reduces the rigid, serious and the mechanical look of the font, while added more warmth and human touch to it. It might still not as easy-to-scan as the typical sans-serif fonts, but it spews personality. The designer describes the project as balancing three competing demands: personal aesthetic preference, traditional methodological rigor, and practical usability – what they call a “three-body problem” of type design.
HS Hwalgong Myeongjo comes with one weight, and it covers Korean and Latin characters. You can download this font for free and be used on commercial projects, as it was released under SIL Open Font License.
Permission
- Free for personal and commercial projects.
- Usage of this font in print, web, video, product packaging, in-app embedding and brand/corporate identity is permitted.
- Font file modification, copying, and redistribution permitted under OFL.
- Selling the font file itself for profit is prohibited.
Link
To download, visit the page above and look for the download button as highlighted below. You may choose to download the TTF, OTF or WOFF2 format. Please use the browser tool to translate this page to your preferred language to make navigation easier. Once installed, you will be able to select this font under the name “HS활공명조” in your design or writing tools.
