The rest family fonts of AXIS compact series, AXIS Compressed fonts were finally released on Wednesday, Type Project inc., which is the foundry of Axis font, announced on its press release. AFAIK, no true compressed Japanese digital font for retail has ever seen before in Japan. AXIS compact series, includes AXIS Condensed, already got the Good Design Award in Communication category in 2008.
Some of famous global companies, Apple Japan, Mazda, Wii by Nintendo, have been using AXIS font Basic family, has squared width, for their commercial applications, web sites and TV commercials. And at the end of last year, NTT Docomo also started using AXIS font for its mobile phone devices as a system font. Now, AXIS font could be used for the devices made by Sharp only, but NTT Docomo announced that all of the future Docomo devices will have the AXIS font.
You can download trial fonts of AXIS font family from Type Project site. You need to put your info, includes your name, your address, OS version you are using, to the submit page’s dialog boxes that marked red color. I recommend you use Google translate, if you had been stuck to input them. After submit your info, Type Project will return info mail to your address, which includes the link for the trial fonts. The trial fonts include about 1,000 Kanji characters, Joyo-Kanji only, but it is available Latin alphabet part, Hiragana, Katakana and sign symbols. You will be able to see what the fonts look like. Of course, the regular fonts for retail are available over 7,000 Kanji characters, Adobe-Japan1-3.
Type Project relaunched its web site. And AXIS inc., is the exclusive dealer for AXIS fonts, also relaunched www.axisfont.com and indicated the Latin family of AXIS font, includes Italic family, will be available soon.
March 14th, 2009 at 6:55 am
Hello Kunihiko! How are you?
I’m sorry that I did not write you for so long… I have sent you an email.
I have downloaded the trial version of Axis Compressed: what a huge work! It’s wonderful.
Who designed all the other language components (Greek, Cyrillic)?
It’s such an amazing work that it has surely employed many different people!
March 15th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Thanks Claudio!
Mr. Akira Kobayashi designed Greek and Cyrillic characters when he designed AXIS Basic Latin components.
In Japanese font, these characters are full-width fixed because we don’t use Greek and Cyrillic characters for text setting but for symbols for mathematics and science terminology mainly. So I don’t think we should use them for body text.
In Japan, these characters have been revised its form in specific way, especially Greek letters, so that Japanese people can easily understand them as symbols. That’s why, I assume there are lots of Greek characters included in Japanese fonts are weird for native people.
Kunihiko Okano Shotype.com