Typography Tuesday
Japanese Dimensional Type
The Japanese sculptor and graphic designer Takenobu Igarachi is well-noted for his axonometric type designs. Igarachi is particularly fond of Roman letter forms, but today we are only showing designs based on Japanese characters from his book Takenobu Igarashi A-Z, published in London by Thames & Hudson in 2020.
The Japanese use four different kinds of characters: kanji imported from China; katakana and hiragana invented by the Japanese; romaji, the Roman alphabet from the West. Kanji are ideographs that use about 7000 characters on average. Hiragana are phonetic symbols devised by women of high society around the 7th to 9th centuries consisting of 50 letters. Katagana, a phonetic alphabet of 50 characters, was invented by Buddhist monks for reading sutra and is made of parts of kanji in simplified form. Comparatively, romaji, or Roman letters used for the Japanese language, is far more simple in shape and structure. In the first two images, Igarachi presents a variety of dimensional Japanese character's.
The last set of images are visualizations of the kanji character hibiki, derived from the Chinese character which means sound, resonance, or echo, representing the corporate philosophy of Igarachi’s client, the Japanese brewing and distilling company Suntory Limited. Working through various morphings of the kanji character, he arrived at what became the Suntory corporate logo. Later, Igarachi made a 3D version utilizing the arch, which was made into a sculpture that adorns the Suntory hall entrance.
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