This keynote presentation was delivered at the Multilingual Typography Symposium at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2011. Through considering the socio-political and socio-linguistic evolutions of bilingualism in Hong Kong, the presentation argues that visual harmony is not always the ultimate concern in cross-cultural typography – its effectiveness depends on how the two languages or scripts as well as their semantic components interact with each other under different contexts and purposes. With a systemic approach, the presentation examines case studies of bilingual typography in Hong Kong, considering bilingualism in terms of parallel translations, code-mixing and code-switching. A comparative descriptive framework for bilingual typography is also presented.