Typblography

As I mentioned in the Typblography article on January 2nd, 2010, the type designer of our groundbreaking new OpenType Japanese font, Kazuraki (かづらき), won an award in 2002 for her earlier, but similar, typeface design. I am very pleased to announce that Kazuraki, an Adobe Originals typeface design by Adobe’s own Ryoko Nishizuka (西塚涼子), recently won its first award, specifically that it is among the winning TDC2 2010 typeface designs.

We’d like to extend to Ryoko our sincere congratulations for this noteworthy and well-deserved achievement. 本当におめでとうございます！ It is quite an honor to have her on our team.

Our groundbreaking new OpenType Japanese font, Kazuraki (かづらき), is now available for sale on our Type Showroom, including those for Japan, France, and Germany. Click here to be taken to the ordering page, which also includes links to its Specimen Book and Glyph Complement PDFs.

Kazuraki was designed by Adobe Systems’ Senior Typeface Designer, Ryoko Nishizuka (西塚涼子), which began as a typeface called Teika that won the Silver Prize in the Kanji Category at Morisawa’s 2002 International Typeface Competition.

Although Kazuraki is branded as a kana font, and includes a full complement of glyphs for hiragana and katakana, it also includes glyphs for 1,082 kanji, symbols, and punctuation, along with fifty vertical two-, three-, and four-character hiragana ligatures. A defining characteristic of Kazuraki is that is fully-proportional in both writing directions. Some glyphs are wider than they are tall, and vice versa, and this is reflected in the glyph metrics. Below is an example:

For those who wish to read about the production details, Adobe Tech Note #5901 is available, and a Japanese translation is provided.

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I and various of my Adobe colleagues were quite chuffed to learn that our interactive presentation “Type & Motion” has been nominated for a Webby award in the “Typography category! Congrats also to Energi Design who created this piece for us.

We’ll have to wait until May 8th to find out if it wins. In the meantime, note that you can vote yourself for the “People’s Voice” awards in each category. For example, to vote on “Best Use of Typography,” go to the main People’s Voice page, then navigate to Web Sites > Features > Best Use of Typography.

The Type Directors Club in New York City recently announced its 14 winning entries from the TDC2 2006 type design competition. It’s always interesting to see the peak of quality and innovation in new typefaces.

Continue reading…