justfont and Taiwan's crowdfunded typeface
NT$1.5 million in eighty minutes. NT$26 million in the end. A typeface named after a tea proved that East Asian type had an audience willing to pay for it.
In August 2015, justfont launched 金萱 (Jin Xuan) on the Taiwanese crowdfunding platform flyingV. The campaign hit NT$1.5 million in eighty minutes. Final tally: roughly NT$26 million from 7,800 backers — the most successful Taiwanese crowdfund of its time, and the first public proof that East Asian display type could be funded the way Western indie type had been funded for years.
The concept was a hybrid: 「明體的情感」+「黑體的簡潔」 — the emotion of Mincho plus the simplicity of Hei. Not a pure serif, not a pure sans. The face was named after 金萱 Jin Xuan, a Taiwanese oolong tea, and shipped in three weights branded as sweetness levels: 半糖 (half sugar), 三分糖 (thirty percent sugar), 七分糖 (seventy percent sugar). The branding is doing real work — it translates an abstract weight axis into something sensory and culturally specific.
What followed was bigger. jf 蘭陽明體 (Lanyangming, 2021–22) — Lin Xia’s most ambitious project — drew on Republican-era engraving from 《澗于集》, later identified as the work of Eileen Chang’s grandfather Zhang Peilun. It supports Taiwanese-Hokkien Tâi-lô romanisation and indigenous Formosan romanisations. Languages that historically had to be set in approximate Latin substitutes finally have a Hanzi face that matches.
The interesting design question is why this happened in Taiwan rather than elsewhere. A Hanzi typeface needs around 13,000 glyphs for reasonable coverage. The per-backer cost of producing that is real — it can’t be hidden in the economics the way a Latin crowdfund can. Taiwan happens to have a design community willing to share that cost, a track record of supporting cultural projects, and justfont’s decade of education work making the case for why type matters.
You can’t crowdfund a Latin family the same way. The community that makes it possible is not the platform.