KkomKkom

How can typography help children learn to write—both on paper and in an increasingly digital learning environment? With KkomKkom, VISANG has developed a typeface specifically designed around children’s motor skills and natural writing movements. Its clear and functional approach earned the typeface a Gold Award from the jury. We talked to the VISANG team about the research behind KkomKkom, its development in collaboration with Hongik University and Leedotype, and how typography can support children throughout the process of learning to write.

In the initial stage of the project, you ran three Focus Group Interviews (FGI) rounds with Hongik University. Who was actually in the room and what surprised you most? Did any finding contradict your initial assumptions about how children perceive or use handwriting typefaces?

KkomKkom did not begin as a single typeface project.

Over five years, VISANG has been conducting ongoing research into the relationship between typography and learning, working with researchers and specialists (including Jiwon Yoo, Seoul National University, and Dankook University) in the field. Over time, this work built a deeper understanding of how children read, recognize, and learn to write.

Building on that research, KkomKkom was developed through a collaboration between VISANG, Hongik University (Min Bon), and Leedotype.

Across three rounds of FGI and writing observation, teachers and researchers worked with children from pre-elementary age to fourth grade, observing how they traced and copied characters on both paper and tablets.

One of the most revealing findings was that a letterform that looks natural and well resolved to an adult is not always easy for a child to write. Children often hesitated around long strokes or crowded areas where several strokes meet. These small behaviors became very concrete design problems for us.

We also found that children still wrote more comfortably and with greater control on paper. Although the project was developed for today's digital learning environment, the research reminded us that technology should never come before the learner.

 

Existing Korean educational typefaces still followed brush forms, but you moved decisively toward constant-stroke thickness. What made you confident enough to break from a decades-old convention? Was this a response to something specific you observed in the research?

We were not trying to reinterpret traditional handwriting. The goal was more practical: to make writing easier to understand and repeat for children who are still learning.

Our earlier research and the FGI sessions helped us see where children actually struggled - long strokes, crowded areas, and points where several strokes meet.

We translated those observations into specific type design decisions: stroke length, proportion, connections, and internal space. The forms were refined around the way a child's hand actually moves.

The even strokes are therefore not simply a visual style. They are the result of solving real writing problems through type design. That process gradually became part of KkomKkom's own visual character.

 

Hangul's structural complexity clearly influenced your entire design architecture. But could another language's orthography, Arabic or Latin scripts with diacritics, apply the same pedagogical principles you developed? Or is this approach fundamentally tied to Korean writing?

For us, what can be carried over from KkomKkom is not its visual form, but its method.

When we developed the Latin alphabet, we did not try to make it look like Hangul. We looked at the specific challenges of learning and writing Latin letters - proportions, curves, and the distinction between similar characters - and designed from there.

We hope this approach can offer a useful reference for learning typefaces in other languages and cultures. The solution cannot be the same for every writing system, but the process can be: observe how people actually learn to write, identify the problems, and respond through design.

The project also revealed questions that still need further research. In Hangul, learning involves more than the form of individual characters- we still need to study how children perceive words as units, and how they experience the space between letters and words, as part of broader units of writing. We see KkomKkom not as a finished answer, but as a starting point for continuing this research.

 

The jury praised KkomKkom for its 'aesthetic clarity' and unwavering functionality. How did you balance functional clarity with typographic refinement during the design process?

We did not want the typeface to be defined by function alone. At the same time, its visual character could never compromise ease of learning.

Our first question was always simple: can a child recognize it clearly and write it naturally? Within that framework, we refined proportion, spacing, weight, and rhythm.

For us, function and visual character were not separate goals. The character of KkomKkom emerged from solving real learning problems, one design decision at a time.

That idea also reflects the research we had been developing: rather than guessing what an educational typeface should look like, we wanted to understand what learners actually need and translate that into design.

 

How did the collaboration between Visang's pedagogical vision and Leedotype foundry's typographic expertise shape the final typeface? Were there tensions between educational requirements and type design principles, and if so, how did you resolve them?

KkomKkom was less a typeface created by a single design team and more a collaborative research project bringing together education, academic research, and professional type design.

VISANG brought years of research and experience in educational content. At Hongik University, a research team led by Professor Min Bon observed and analyzed how children actually write, while Leedotype translated those findings into a working type system.

Professor Min Bon brought his expertise in typography, including experience related to the development of an Apple sans-serif typeface. Together with Leedotype's professional type design expertise and VISANG's educational research, this gave the project several different but complementary perspectives.

The process was iterative: research, design, test, refine - and repeat.

When different perspectives emerged, we returned to the children's actual writing behavior rather than personal preference. That dialogue between education, research, and type design became an important part of the design process itself.

 

KkomKkom is now used by children, parents, and teachers. What have you learned from its use in real educational settings that you could not have learned during the design process?

We did not want KkomKkom to end as a font file. The real goal was to help children see, trace, practise, and gradually learn to write with it.

So the project expanded beyond Hangul to include numbers and Latin letters, together with learning materials designed for different stages of writing practice. Children can work with pencil on paper as well as with a digital pen on a tablet. We also made the typeface and related learning resources freely available so they could be used by more children, teachers, and parents.

One of the most important findings was that digital does not automatically mean better for learning. We saw children write with greater stability on paper, where the friction between pencil and surface provides physical feedback that a smooth screen cannot.

Digital tools, however, offer different possibilities - showing stroke order, supporting repetition, and creating interaction.

So the question was never paper versus digital. It was how each medium could support learning in the way it does best.

KkomKkom ultimately expanded our idea of what type design for learning can be. It is not only about designing letterforms. It is about considering who is learning, with what tools, in what environment, and through what stages of learning.

 

Could you introduce VISANG's Creative Design Center and the team behind KkomKkom?

VISANG is a global Ed-tech company spanning from textbooks to AI-powered digital educational content. VISANG's Creative Design Center is led by Creative Director Kim Jaehun. Design research projects such as KkomKkom are carried out by the Design Planning Team (Son Heejin, Jung Yurim, Shin Yewon).

For us, KkomKkom was never only about creating a typeface. It was part of a longer exploration of the relationship between learning and design. The project was made possible by combining the Center's internal planning and design expertise with external research and professional type design.