Questions for Font Creators Part 1: What Made You Interested in Typeface Design? 2

In the previous article, we introduced stories related to class in student days in regard to what made our staff interested in typeface design. Apart from that, common keywords appearing in answers from typeface designers were “lettering and drawn lettering.”

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Drawn lettering (there is no particular trigger, as it is integral). As I liked the drawn lettering of Shigeru Inada, I started to do lettering and that led me to become interested in typeface design.

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When I did lettering for my name, I was impressed by changes in the impression of characters with a difference in one line.

I, too, found out about the existence of typeface design after becoming interested in the shape of characters. It may not be uncommon for one to choose a path to typeface design as an extension of interest in hand-written characters.

From the answers from engineers, some of them became interested in typeface design through a different genre connected to typeface design, such as through their careers in the past, rendering in computers, etc.

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Because I was a writer, I was interested in characters as locations where my written words are established.

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It was around the time of the announcement of Windows Vista when I was a junior high school student. As this OS was rich in design compared to the previous XP, operation slowed down in the machine specifications distributed. Therefore, reducing file weight often became an issue. I found out about an OS called Ubuntu. The font rendering was beautiful and the extensibility of appearance was also high-level, so I started customizing the OS myself. I found out about a variety of fonts in that process, and I started creating them by myself. Through that, I became interested in typeface creation and design.
Regarding rendering: The font rendering method called ClearType in Windows was extremely rational for low resolution, but I felt the normal gray scale rendering was more beautiful.

Reading answers to the question, I found out that while some people become interested in typeface design through their interests in writing and creating characters themselves, there are people who reach typeface design from interest as users of characters.

Because I have always been interested in typeface design from the beginning as a creator, it is quite difficult for me to take on the perspective of a user. However, I began to feel again that I would like to listen to stories from the users of the typefaces we actually create.

(XYZ)