Insight
Can Fonts Have Color?
Traditional fonts consisted only of black and white—just outlines and strokes. To add color to text, you had to convert the font to outlines and manually apply colors. Adding gradients or multiple colors to individual characters required editing each one separately. Even this was only possible in certain applications that supported the feature. Most text editors could only work with black-and-white fonts. But now there's a way to express color directly through fonts themselves. Today, we'll explore "color fonts"—already deeply embedded in our daily lives though often unnoticed—and "emoji fonts," which make the most sophisticated use of color in typography.
The History of Fonts
A "color font" is exactly what it sounds like: a typeface with color built into the characters. While standard fonts contain only black outline data for each glyph, color fonts include either bitmap images or outline data with embedded color values for each character. This allows programs to easily display colored text without any conversion process. But you might wonder—isn't displaying text in colors other than black unusual? So why did color get incorporated into fonts in the first place?
To explain the background of color font development, we need to trace the history of fonts themselves. The fonts we use daily are collectively called "digital fonts"—essentially programs that output pre-designed glyphs when you input specific codes through devices like keyboards. Digital fonts were first developed in the 1970s, when personal computers (PCs) became commercially available. Over more than 50 years, digital fonts have evolved alongside computer technology to meet user needs.
In the early 1970s, personal computers had storage capacity measured in bytes, forcing all programs to be extremely compact. This practical constraint led to bitmap font technology being developed first—it could represent characters efficiently using pixel-based expressions with minimal file size. While bitmap fonts rendered in blocky pixels looked increasingly crude as resolutions increased, there were no alternatives at the time.
As computer technology advanced and storage capacity expanded dramatically, the font size constraint was resolved, and users increasingly demanded freedom from resolution limitations. After considerable effort by various companies to address bitmap fonts' shortcomings, vector font technology emerged, capable of rendering identical forms regardless of resolution scaling. Though output quality still varies depending on display resolution support, the advent of vector fonts largely solved resolution constraints. This technology is used in most fonts produced today.
The first digital bitmap font, Digi Grotesk
Image Source: This Was The First Computer Font (Link)
The Emergence of Emoji: The Beginning of Color Fonts
As personal mobile devices became widespread in the 1990s, demand grew for communication tools beyond simple text in constrained environments like email and text messaging. Against this backdrop, a new form of character called "emoji" emerged in Japan. Derived from the Japanese 絵文字 (e-moji, meaning picture + character), emoji are pictographic characters that visually represent emotions, concepts, and objects. Initially numbering only around 180, emoji grew increasingly popular and proliferated across various companies. However, without established standards, each company's emoji differed in variety and design, creating compatibility issues between devices that limited their use.
Despite these challenges, emoji's popularity blazed beyond Japan to become a global phenomenon. In response, major corporations like Google and Apple moved to standardize emoji, and their inclusion in Unicode—the international character standard—granted them recognition as official "characters." With international standards established and their role as characters formalized, emoji fonts naturally began to launch, allowing users to easily input emoji through their keyboards.
Early emoji created by SoftBank in 1997
Image Source: The History of the Emoji — Pursue Persuade (Link)
As emoji users grew, a new problem emerged. Due to the font technology limitations of the time, which could only render in black, early emoji fonts were strictly monochrome. Before emoji, there had been little demand for color in text, and separate programs could convert fonts to single colors if needed. Practical concerns like file size and compatibility meant color data simply wasn't included in fonts. However, emoji required multiple colors within a single image to achieve nuanced expression—single-color rendering couldn't capture the necessary detail.
Ultimately, black-and-white fonts couldn't adequately represent the details of emoji like smiling faces, red hearts, food, and animals. Users wanted full-color emoji that could convey emotions more vividly and with greater variety. In response, multiple platform companies began developing "color font" technology to provide colored emoji. In 2011, Apple introduced the "Apple Color Emoji" font as the default for iPhone and MacBook, unveiling SBIX—the first color font format supporting bitmap images. This was followed by Microsoft's COLR/CPAL format in 2013 and Google's CBDT/CBLC format in 2014, with each company adopting different approaches to support color emoji fonts. Through this historical progression, color font technology came into the world.
Apple Color Emoji
Types of Color Fonts
Color font technology is currently in a transitional phase. With each company developing color font formats tailored to their own systems, compatibility issues across different platforms mean no color font yet works perfectly in all environments. Today, color fonts are produced in four formats depending on platform and purpose, with COLR and SVG being the most commonly used.
COLR, developed by Microsoft, is the most widely adopted format thanks to broad program support and resolution flexibility with minimal file size. However, it's limited to simple color expressions. The recently introduced COLRv1 format addresses COLRv0's shortcomings—being vector-based, it has no resolution constraints and supports blending, gradients, and other effects, positioning it as a promising next-generation color font standard.
SVG is a font format that embeds SVG image data—widely used on the web—into glyphs. Supporting both vector and bitmap formats, it has no resolution limitations. As the most recent technology, it's supported by most operating systems and offers particularly strong usability in web environments—significant advantages.
Additionally, there are Google's and Apple's bitmap-based formats: CBDT/CBLC and SBIX respectively. These formats are limited to Android and iOS support only, and being bitmap-based, they have larger file sizes and lack resolution flexibility. Consequently, they're used less frequently now compared to the two formats mentioned earlier.
What Color Fonts Are There?
As fonts developed in the COLRv1 format—addressing the limitations of earlier color fonts that could only achieve simple expressions—are being released one after another, a fresh wind is also blowing through color fonts. Typearture’s 「Nabla」 is a Latin font inspired by vintage games; with gradients applied, it expresses color in a more natural and richer way, and it also supports variable features that allow the depth of the letters to be adjusted, enabling broader use. Underware’s 「Plakato」 allows users to directly control the gradient’s color and radius through variable features, and when applied on the web, the color can also be changed. Other color fonts include Harbor Type’s 「Rocher Color」, among many others.
Because Hangul consists of a large number of characters—at least 2,350 and up to 11,172—each layer of each character must have its colors set, which leads to inefficient workload; as a result, there are very few cases of Hangul color fonts being released. Even so, Hangul fonts that support color reveal a new kind of appeal. At Sandoll, 「Sandoll hoyoyoyo Color」 and 「Sandoll dunggullim Color」 were released in 2020; adding color to fonts with cute imagery makes them feel even more lively in use. Biondwimujigaejedan’s 「Gilbeotche」 is a Hangul version of the Latin font Gilbert, designed to express diversity and inclusivity; in addition to the main rainbow-color version, it also offers various other color options. Other examples include Fontrix’s 「Rixtoicolor」 and Yoon Design’s 「Wageulwageul Color」.
「Sandoll Hoyoyo Color」 Pumpkin
Closing Thoughts
Today, we explored color fonts. Color fonts, currently in a transitional phase, are a technology with vast potential for further development. New formats such as SVG and COLRv1 continue to be updated, and as they are applied to variable fonts as well, they open up many possibilities. It may not be long before we see fonts that feel alive and breathing, rather than simply filled with color.
However, color fonts have yet to gain real traction in the Hangul font market. At present, fewer than ten Hangul color fonts have been released. Of course, there are still various issues that color fonts have not yet resolved, but as discussed in the history of color fonts, fonts continue to evolve in response to user demand. For fonts to develop in a better direction, there must be more opportunities to use them and to talk about them. We hope that color fonts will find broader applications in more diverse contexts. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to try using color fonts in your own work as well.
References
COLRv1 and CSS font-palette | CSS-Tricks
What is COLRv1?
The Complete History of Emoji
Emoji
The History of the Emoji — Pursue Persuade
This Was The First Computer Font
Insight
Can Fonts Have Color?
Traditional fonts consisted only of black and white—just outlines and strokes. To add color to text, you had to convert the font to outlines and manually apply colors. Adding gradients or multiple colors to individual characters required editing each one separately. Even this was only possible in certain applications that supported the feature. Most text editors could only work with black-and-white fonts. But now there's a way to express color directly through fonts themselves. Today, we'll explore "color fonts"—already deeply embedded in our daily lives though often unnoticed—and "emoji fonts," which make the most sophisticated use of color in typography.
The History of Fonts
A "color font" is exactly what it sounds like: a typeface with color built into the characters. While standard fonts contain only black outline data for each glyph, color fonts include either bitmap images or outline data with embedded color values for each character. This allows programs to easily display colored text without any conversion process. But you might wonder—isn't displaying text in colors other than black unusual? So why did color get incorporated into fonts in the first place?
To explain the background of color font development, we need to trace the history of fonts themselves. The fonts we use daily are collectively called "digital fonts"—essentially programs that output pre-designed glyphs when you input specific codes through devices like keyboards. Digital fonts were first developed in the 1970s, when personal computers (PCs) became commercially available. Over more than 50 years, digital fonts have evolved alongside computer technology to meet user needs.
In the early 1970s, personal computers had storage capacity measured in bytes, forcing all programs to be extremely compact. This practical constraint led to bitmap font technology being developed first—it could represent characters efficiently using pixel-based expressions with minimal file size. While bitmap fonts rendered in blocky pixels looked increasingly crude as resolutions increased, there were no alternatives at the time.
As computer technology advanced and storage capacity expanded dramatically, the font size constraint was resolved, and users increasingly demanded freedom from resolution limitations. After considerable effort by various companies to address bitmap fonts' shortcomings, vector font technology emerged, capable of rendering identical forms regardless of resolution scaling. Though output quality still varies depending on display resolution support, the advent of vector fonts largely solved resolution constraints. This technology is used in most fonts produced today.
Image Source: This Was The First Computer Font (Link)
The Emergence of Emoji: The Beginning of Color Fonts
As personal mobile devices became widespread in the 1990s, demand grew for communication tools beyond simple text in constrained environments like email and text messaging. Against this backdrop, a new form of character called "emoji" emerged in Japan. Derived from the Japanese 絵文字 (e-moji, meaning picture + character), emoji are pictographic characters that visually represent emotions, concepts, and objects. Initially numbering only around 180, emoji grew increasingly popular and proliferated across various companies. However, without established standards, each company's emoji differed in variety and design, creating compatibility issues between devices that limited their use.
Despite these challenges, emoji's popularity blazed beyond Japan to become a global phenomenon. In response, major corporations like Google and Apple moved to standardize emoji, and their inclusion in Unicode—the international character standard—granted them recognition as official "characters." With international standards established and their role as characters formalized, emoji fonts naturally began to launch, allowing users to easily input emoji through their keyboards.
Early emoji created by SoftBank in 1997
Image Source: The History of the Emoji — Pursue Persuade (Link)
As emoji users grew, a new problem emerged. Due to the font technology limitations of the time, which could only render in black, early emoji fonts were strictly monochrome. Before emoji, there had been little demand for color in text, and separate programs could convert fonts to single colors if needed. Practical concerns like file size and compatibility meant color data simply wasn't included in fonts. However, emoji required multiple colors within a single image to achieve nuanced expression—single-color rendering couldn't capture the necessary detail.
Ultimately, black-and-white fonts couldn't adequately represent the details of emoji like smiling faces, red hearts, food, and animals. Users wanted full-color emoji that could convey emotions more vividly and with greater variety. In response, multiple platform companies began developing "color font" technology to provide colored emoji. In 2011, Apple introduced the "Apple Color Emoji" font as the default for iPhone and MacBook, unveiling SBIX—the first color font format supporting bitmap images. This was followed by Microsoft's COLR/CPAL format in 2013 and Google's CBDT/CBLC format in 2014, with each company adopting different approaches to support color emoji fonts. Through this historical progression, color font technology came into the world.
Types of Color Fonts
Color font technology is currently in a transitional phase. With each company developing color font formats tailored to their own systems, compatibility issues across different platforms mean no color font yet works perfectly in all environments. Today, color fonts are produced in four formats depending on platform and purpose, with COLR and SVG being the most commonly used.
COLR, developed by Microsoft, is the most widely adopted format thanks to broad program support and resolution flexibility with minimal file size. However, it's limited to simple color expressions. The recently introduced COLRv1 format addresses COLRv0's shortcomings—being vector-based, it has no resolution constraints and supports blending, gradients, and other effects, positioning it as a promising next-generation color font standard.
SVG is a font format that embeds SVG image data—widely used on the web—into glyphs. Supporting both vector and bitmap formats, it has no resolution limitations. As the most recent technology, it's supported by most operating systems and offers particularly strong usability in web environments—significant advantages.
Additionally, there are Google's and Apple's bitmap-based formats: CBDT/CBLC and SBIX respectively. These formats are limited to Android and iOS support only, and being bitmap-based, they have larger file sizes and lack resolution flexibility. Consequently, they're used less frequently now compared to the two formats mentioned earlier.
What Color Fonts Are There?
As fonts developed in the COLRv1 format—addressing the limitations of earlier color fonts that could only achieve simple expressions—are being released one after another, a fresh wind is also blowing through color fonts. Typearture’s 「Nabla」 is a Latin font inspired by vintage games; with gradients applied, it expresses color in a more natural and richer way, and it also supports variable features that allow the depth of the letters to be adjusted, enabling broader use. Underware’s 「Plakato」 allows users to directly control the gradient’s color and radius through variable features, and when applied on the web, the color can also be changed. Other color fonts include Harbor Type’s 「Rocher Color」, among many others.
Because Hangul consists of a large number of characters—at least 2,350 and up to 11,172—each layer of each character must have its colors set, which leads to inefficient workload; as a result, there are very few cases of Hangul color fonts being released. Even so, Hangul fonts that support color reveal a new kind of appeal. At Sandoll, 「Sandoll hoyoyoyo Color」 and 「Sandoll dunggullim Color」 were released in 2020; adding color to fonts with cute imagery makes them feel even more lively in use. Biondwimujigaejedan’s 「Gilbeotche」 is a Hangul version of the Latin font Gilbert, designed to express diversity and inclusivity; in addition to the main rainbow-color version, it also offers various other color options. Other examples include Fontrix’s 「Rixtoicolor」 and Yoon Design’s 「Wageulwageul Color」.
「Sandoll Hoyoyo Color」 Pumpkin
Closing Thoughts
Today, we explored color fonts. Color fonts, currently in a transitional phase, are a technology with vast potential for further development. New formats such as SVG and COLRv1 continue to be updated, and as they are applied to variable fonts as well, they open up many possibilities. It may not be long before we see fonts that feel alive and breathing, rather than simply filled with color.
However, color fonts have yet to gain real traction in the Hangul font market. At present, fewer than ten Hangul color fonts have been released. Of course, there are still various issues that color fonts have not yet resolved, but as discussed in the history of color fonts, fonts continue to evolve in response to user demand. For fonts to develop in a better direction, there must be more opportunities to use them and to talk about them. We hope that color fonts will find broader applications in more diverse contexts. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to try using color fonts in your own work as well.
References
COLRv1 and CSS font-palette | CSS-Tricks
What is COLRv1?
The Complete History of Emoji
Emoji
The History of the Emoji — Pursue Persuade
This Was The First Computer Font