One of the world’s most accomplished designers of Western typefaces comes from an unlikely place. [1] Akira Kobayashi began working at a phototype manufacturer in Japan where he had to draw hundreds of complex Japanese characters every week. He was soon turned on to Western alphabets and went on to win awards for his Latin typefaces. As Type Director for Linotype, Kobayashi works with legends of type design — Adrian Frutiger and Hermann Zapf — to update their most important faces: Avenir, Frutiger, Palatino, and Optima. Here we feature just a small slice of Kobayashi’s finest work.  

fontshop.com publish here, his essay on the making of [2] FF Clifford™. It is a wonderfully personal story about the struggles and discoveries of a five-year journey in type design. This text and its illustrations are published in the book “[3] Made with FontFont”, which is filled with other histories and visual examples of the typefaces in FontShop’s house foundry. — SC

[4] More…