Client: Geely

Custom Typeface for Geely

When a redesign becomes a ground-up redraw

TypeTogether, working with Chinese partner FounderType, redesigned and ultimately redrew from scratch a Latin typeface for Geely Automotive, delivered in 2019. The family was intended for printed advertising, in-car infotainment displays, dashboards, and physical switch labeling. It debuted publicly in July 2021 on the Geely Xingyue L SUV running the Milky Way OS.

Set in Geely Sans

Insights

The original Geely typeface tried to replicate the wordmark's square, horizontal-stroke logic in the lowercase, but lowercase Latin letters are predominantly curved, causing legibility failures at stroke connections, spurs, and crotches.
The team drew the family from scratch rather than correcting the existing font, because the required changes were too numerous for revision to be viable.
Three weights were delivered — extralight through bold — plus a separate additional cut for physical switches; the font set includes proportional figures, tabular figures, and a wider numeral set designed exclusively for the speedometer.
Uppercase letters were made slightly more squarish than the lowercase to suit the all-caps typesetting common on car dashboards, while round letters were kept only subtly stiff to preserve legibility.