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

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

The weight variation is only R (Regular) style and Latin parts are Helvetica. The route map on the sign bord 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 type design and typography situation in Japan, because there seemed to be nothing web site in English concerning Japanese type design.

Although I didn’t know which is the best application for my blog, I set up WordPress for a starter. I have a lot on my plate to complete this site, but I wanted to start this at the beginning of April so that I can excuse that it was April fool, if I will not continue to post topic on this blog.

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