Typophile

Japanese display fonts

ill sans

Hi everyone,

I’ve always been fond of anything Japanese & I’m now studying the Hiragana & Katana characters. Mind you, I’m not actually studying Japanese, I’m merely looking at the forms & trying to figure out in what length they can be stylized.
I’ve been googling myself silly to find Japanese display fonts, but I’m not really getting the results I’m looking for.
Things I’m looking for include mostly digital (pixel based) display fonts used for cell phones and such (see attached image), but also any kind of Japanese letterlogo. I think by looking at pixel based Hiragana & Katana characters, I’ll get a better insight into how much of it is “expandable” & what the real characteristics of each character are. Logo’s would obviously also be helpful at this point.
Any links would be much appreciated.

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Katakana.GIF10.1 KB
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Hrant H Papazian

Just remember what Peter Lofting said about Frutiger’s
failed “Swiss-reductionist” Devanagari (Indian) font:

“You cannot chop up the curly bits.”

BTW, do check out the work of Joachim Müller-Lancé.

hhp

Jason Pagura

For Japanese display fonts, I’d suggest starting at Maniackers Design, http://mks.jp.org/ , and after you have a good look at their selection of fonts, poke around in their lengthy and (unfortunately) quite aged links page.

You’ll find a lot of Hiragana and Katakana display fonts around, many having matching Latin alphabets, but very few Kanji fonts, and you’ll find that many of the Kana fonts are mapped to standard U.S. keyboard keyspaces rather than properly encoded for Japanese keying systems, but for the short passages of text one would use a display font for, that is usually sufficient.

Jason Pagura

A thing I’ve noticed about Japanese web sites in general: while they may use Japanese text in their navigation, an awful lot of them use English in their HTML file names, so keep an eye on your status bar as you point at links and you might get a clue as to where they go.

ill sans

I’ll definitely check out Joachim Müller-Lancé’s work.
Maniackers Design was already in my favourites list, but I haven’t actually checked their links out (DUH!). The HTML tip will be very useful, I’m always scared at clicking things I don’t know where they lead to.
Thanks!

Michio F

Kataoka Design Works
Marumin Old
Iroha Gothic

Visual Design Laboratory

Taka Design Production

DynaComware
DynaComware PDF Catalogue

ill sans

Wow! Domo arigato! ;-)

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