Typography
Language
The only official language in Germany is German, which is used for all official communication.
However, you can hear a great diversity of languages spoken within Germany as it is a multicultural society. A lot of people who live in Germany have a different mother tongue, e.g. Russian, Turkish, Polish, Kurdish, Italian, Greek, Arabic, Dutch, Serbian, Croatian, Spanish and many more.
The capital Berlin is a very cosmopolitan city and English is widely spoken. This is not the case in rural areas.
Special characters
Ä Ö Ü ß
German is a west Germanic language and has special glyphs like Ä,Ü or Ö and also ß. They are often used in
German grammar. Before using a font, always check if these glyphs are available in the font you chose when designing for Germany.
Copywriting
Creative and playful translations
When it comes to playful creations like Caturday (Cat + Saturday) it really depends if it is a term that is understandable for the Germans or if it is a creation you might think it is really this term. But in general, Germans like to play with words, because there are so many words for different actions and objects and therefore we like to use them.
Email and social media copy
Mostly for social media captions and subtitles, we opt for more casual and slang-ish terms to make it feel like the content belongs to that territory. We won’t use anything formal in social media since it will make it too official, boring, and not relevant.
Character limit
We keep the copy as short as possible. There are creative ways to do so. If one word is too long there is always a creative way to choose other similar words and make it shorter. If you really think the space is needed and there is no other way to do so, reach out to the Design Lead for this specific project and find creative solutions together.
Brand Fonts
German
Canva Sans Regular
Canva Sans Medium
Canva Sans
Bold
Canva Display Regular
Canva Display Medium
Canva Display Bold
Learn more about the German alphabet, diacritic and punctuation use, and our Brand and Playground fonts.
Playground Fonts
German
Monument
Black Mango
Open Sauce
Catchy Mager
Tan Aegean
Antonio Bold
Quincy
Libre Baskerville
Zing Rust Base
DM Serif Display
Tan Kindred
Hagrid Text
Global Services
About project
Credits
Questions?
These guides are made for our internal marketing teams to help with asset localisation that feel truly local.
Brought to you by Marketing Localisation, Global Services, in collaboration with
i18n Templates team.
#localisation channel on Slack