Erin Teske Well-designed typography is the front door to every patient’s healthcare experience—especially individuals with Limited English Proficiency. Stanford Health Care (SHC) provides translation and interpretation in more than 200 languages each year. Yet healthcare has paid insufficient attention to multilingual type design, limiting awareness and use of these services. SHC once lacked a designated font for Traditional Chinese in its style guide, for example, causing poor readability for a substantial number of patients. Similar issues have affected readers of Farsi, among other scripts.
In 2017, SHC invested in a system-wide patient education department, a cornerstone of which was developing typographic and design best practices for patient education materials in global scripts. Our goal: to ensure consistent, accurate, and usable materials for all patients. Partnering with type designers, we identified challenges in on-screen rendering, selected culturally appropriate typefaces, and created an in-house Style Guide with script-specific conventions—from text hierarchy and page layout to platform settings for accurate display, including bidirectional scripts.
Beyond technical findings, one of our most significant outcomes was learning how to develop a multi-script, multilingual Style Guide within a large, diverse, multi-stakeholder institution like SHC. It required bridging gaps between administrators and caregivers with little design experience, designers and technologists who may not speak the target languages, and third-party vendors. Our work offers a model for other large, complex institutions to follow suit, within and beyond healthcare.
We also demonstrated the return on investment of multi-script and multilingual best practices. Enhancing readability and usability improved patient experience while shortening translation turnaround times, enabling faster delivery of critical information and advancing SHC’s commitment to patient safety, cost efficiency, and equitable care.
Future work includes expanding to additional scripts and languages, raising awareness among healthcare technology providers (e.g., Epic), and partnering with designers and technologists to deepen this work.