Sure, type foundries make functional font files for their customers, and in most cases the goal of these fonts is to display readable text (more or less). However, some designs seem deliberately to work against that goal. This presentation goes over some interesting diversity in Hanyi Fonts’ recent projects. Hanyi Fonts carried out multiple digital… Continue reading To Be, or Not to Be Read?
A perhaps inevitable result of China being a nation of calligraphy is that a large percentage of Chinese typefaces are calligraphic. Over thousands of years, Chinese calligraphy has accumulated an abundance of resources for innovating and developing Chinese typefaces. Translating the unique, culturally rich art of calligraphy into practical typefaces nevertheless presents many difficulties. How… Continue reading The Carrier of the Soul
Type historians are well aware of early innovations in low-resolution font development by foundries and designers such as Emigre and Zuzana Licko. But what about the history of low-resolution screen and printer fonts for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other non-Latin scripts? In this talk, Stanford professor Tom Mullaney examines the history of the Sinotype III,… Continue reading “Lo-Res” Chinese: Toward a History of Non-Latin Bitmap Fonts
Chromatics, the science of color, relies on tools like color chips, color solids, and color wheels as teaching devices. Coffee purveyors make use of flavor wheels to educate consumers about variations in the taste and aromatics of coffee. Arphic Technology is trying to develop a “flavor wheel” for type that classifies typefaces according to different… Continue reading A Type “Flavor Wheel”
A regular Japanese typeface is square by nature, but handwritten characters—the kind of characters one sees in correspondence and scribbled notes—enjoy more freedom. Japanese typography evolved into a square-based system for the sake of efficiency and legibility, but the appeal of handwritten forms has never gone away; people have always tried to break the square… Continue reading Designing an Energetic Typeface from Handwriting
Nobuo Morisawa, Akihiko Morisawa’s grandfather, was an inventor. In 1924, he co-invented phototypesetting. He theorized that Japanese could be typeset in an entirely monospaced way, and he successfully mechanized the technique. The Q and Ha units (0.25 mm) that were made in the process instead of points remain vital in Japanese typesetting to this day.… Continue reading Type. My Life.
Western typography was imported from the United States to Japan in the late nineteenth century. Its success is usually attributed to just two people: Tomiji Hirano and Shozo Motoki. Even though Kawaka Ikehara reportedly provided them with the original drawings and is thus potentially the source of all modern Japanese typefaces, he is a much… Continue reading Kawaka Ikehara, the Designer of the First Japanese Metal Types
This presentation was initiated by the Japan Typography Association, an organization that has been publishing the influential Japan Typography Annual for over half a century. Three leading typographers will offer their perspectives on the rising importance of kanji typography. Font designer Akira Kataoka will discuss the study and presentation of kanji typefaces; type designer Yoshimaru… Continue reading Contemporary Trends in Kanji Typography: Three Perspectives
This session details a personal project by Masataka Hattori at Adobe that examines what is required to develop a fully functional CJK variable font that supports design-variation axes other than for weight, and explores the one for width. A typical Western variable font would support axes not only for weight and width, but also for… Continue reading Developing a Concept CJK Variable Font Based on Source Han Sans
Hiragino, one of the best-known typeface families in Japan, is ubiquitous. It was also among the first typefaces to have migrated from CID to the OpenType font format, and thus a number of dedicated tools had to be developed in order to produce it. What tools were used to make the family when there was… Continue reading The History of Hiragino’s Development from a Technical Perspective