![]() Typography consciously and subconsciously seeps into every crevice, so I believe there’s a responsibility that comes with creating and using type. I see typography and typefaces as the atomic units of the visual language that shapes our world. A future of more inclusive type design and typography, in my opinion, is less about the tools and technology, but more about the unintentional or subconscious decisions that type designers are making around language support. It’s clear that it’s easier than ever to design and distribute a font, and have someone create something with said font, but I often wonder if there’s currently a lack of criticality and cultural sensitivity missing in that process. When I mindlessly meander the web and social media, I will often stumble upon many original typefaces of varying degrees of completion and quality. Being able to create composite fonts (a feature built into Japanese InDesign) has become a necessary and indispensable part of my work, and allows me to consider new combinations of type choices and layout. As a bilingual graphic designer living and working in Japan, much of my work requires complex typesetting where I combine Latin alphabet fonts with Japanese fonts. ![]() Similarly, while it’s fair to criticise what many see as the monopolistic and anti-competitive actions of Adobe, the access and flexibility of multilingual support in their desktop publishing software like InDesign is currently unmatched. Before OpenType, languages of the SWANA region like Arabic were roughly constrained to the shape of the em unit and could not fully express the nuances of a calligraphic written language. For example, the development of the OpenType format created new possibilities for a font’s capabilities, including the programming of contextual forms. The evolution of type technology has aided in the proliferation of other languages and scripts as well. Checks and revisions are, of course, still necessary, but CJK typefaces can be designed with modular radical components to save precious time and money. However, workflows have since improved and been accelerated with automation. The process of designing a Japanese font still requires years of planning, drawing and testing to support the written language’s four character types: Hiragana (phonetic syllabary), Katakana (phonetic syllabary, primarily for loan words), Kanji (ideograms adapted from Chinese Hanzi) and Latin letterforms. Chinese and Japanese) necessitate thousands of characters to be usable. ![]() Unlike the Latin alphabet, many East Asian character sets (e.g. The lack of friction with an out-of-the-box and all-in-one solution to type design was revelatory – personally, I had learned type design using Robofont in 2014 at which, while a great piece of software, required a more intimate knowledge of its capabilities and an understanding of the auxiliary tools necessary to make a typeface.Īccessibility towards designing non-Latin scripts, though not quite equal, is steadily evolving and improving as well. I recently purchased a licence for the type design software Glyphs and I was shocked by how easily I was able to get up to speed over the course of only a handful of Youtube video tutorials. While access to a more formal type design education is still limited in many parts of the world, the software itself has a much shallower learning curve, which makes it much more possible for one to become a self-taught type designer. ![]() Unlike the days of meticulously punch cutting single letterforms for metal type (of a single point size, no less), with modern type design software, written languages can now be digitised and designed with relative ease. Due to the accessibility and relative affordability of modern type design and typesetting software, as well as multilingual support enabled by Unicode standards, the barriers to diverse typographic expression have been lowered over the past few decades. ![]() The future of type design and typography is looking more inclusive and diverse than ever before. ![]()
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