The Kazui Press, which is the most famous letterpress house, especially Latin composition, in Japan, relaunched its website at the beginning of April. For the renewal of the website, several specimens of the hot metals they had were added to it, so you can see specimens on not only several classic and traditional typefaces, but also ornaments and wood types with the photos of hot metals for letterpress.

Seibu Railway, which runs through in northwest Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture, started new signange systems using AXIS font as a main font to change its sign boards.

The brilliant blue color of the sign board looks good and very striking, but I was wondering whether the commuters have been aware of this replacement. When I saw the new design sign board at Nerima-Takanodai station of the Ikebukulo line, located near my office, for the frst time, I couldn’t see at a glance that was AXIS font because I didn’t have enough skills to find out the difference of Kanji characters among the other Japanese Fonts. However, I could tell the Hiragana “た” as I knew well the characteristic Kana forms of AXIS.

Regular weight was used for the signboard letters and Latin parts are Helvetica. The route map on the sign board is also the same. The old sign boards seem to be replaced by the new design, which is in progress now.

AFAIK, this is the second case AXIS is in use for a railway signage. The first one is Hisatsu Orange Railway in Kumamoto and Kagoshima pref., which started new sign boards that were designed by an architect Yasuyuki Kawanishi in 2004.

I started my design office and my blog today. I’ve been thinking about that I try to introduce situation on type design and typography in Japan, because there seemed to be nothing English language web site concerning Japanese type design.

Although I didn’t know which is the best tool for my blog, I set up WordPress for a starter. I have a lot of work on my plate to revise this site, but I wanted to start this at April 1st so that I could excuse that it was April fool if I would not continue to post topics to this blog.

I have to say I’m not good at English, so I need to excuse my English skills in advance. I would appreciated if you had find out my mistake and let me know about it. Any suggestion and comment would be appreciated. Thanks!