Sandoll, the foundry behind your phone
If you read Korean on a phone, you are almost certainly reading a Sandoll typeface. That is not an accident — it is four decades of infrastructure work.
산돌 Sandoll was founded in 1984 by Seok Geum-ho (석금호) as 산돌타이포그라픽스 — Korea’s first independent type foundry in the modern sense. In 1995, Sandoll released 산돌고딕 and 산돌명조, the foundational sans and serif of Korean digital typography. Those two faces set the tone for what Korean screen type looked like through the desktop era.
The infrastructural commissions followed. In 2002, Microsoft asked Sandoll to draw 맑은 고딕 (Malgun Gothic) as the Korean UI typeface for Windows Vista. In 2011, Apple replaced its older Korean system font with Apple SD Gothic Neo — also a Sandoll design — and that is still the Korean interface face on every iPhone shipped today.
In 2021, Sandoll drew Toss Product Sans for the Korean fintech Toss, which became the benchmark for Korean product typography in consumer apps.
“These fonts achieve the goal of ‘No More Tofu,’ meaning no empty glyphs when typesetting Unicode.” — Seok Geum-ho, on Sandoll’s contribution to Source Han Sans
Sandoll was also one of the foundry partners on Source Han Sans (released 2014) — designers Joo-Yeon Kang and Soo-Young Jang handled the Korean glyphs in what became the largest pan-CJK typeface ever published.
Seok Geum-ho passed away on 23 May 2024.
The counterpoint that emerged in the same period is worth noting. Pretendard — an open-source neo-grotesque by Hyeong-jin Kil, based on Inter, Source Han, and M PLUS 1p — was adopted by the Korean government in April 2024 as the default typeface for the national UI/UX system. A free font is now the default voice of the Korean state interface. Beside it, on every Korean iPhone, is a Sandoll face.
Two poles of the same ecosystem. One traces back to 1984 and a founder who spent forty years building Korean type as professional infrastructure. The other traces back to a developer who published a free font and a government that chose it. Both are serving Korean readers. Neither makes the other redundant.