{Japanese Typeface Design---Similarities and Differences from Western Typeface Design}
{TAKATA Yumi}
{What is Japanese typeface design about? As a Japanese type designer for
nearly 30 years, I will explain what it is to design a Japanese typeface,
what it does and does not have in common with designing a Western
typeface.

First, we will take a quick look at the history of Japanese characters,
in particular how the shapes of the characters have evolved through the
times.

Then I will illustrate the process of Japanese typeface design in
detail. Japanese typeface designers face the challenge of dealing with
more than 9,000 characters and multiple constituent scripts. Some
examples will be given of the various accommodation techniques we use
to create readable and visually appealing typefaces, including adjusting
for optical illusion.

Another big challenge we face is the vertical and horizontal writing
modes. I will show how we finetune
the glyph design of each character,
one by one, for both vertical and horizontal writing modes.

Finally, the complications related to Japanese coded character sets
will be briefly explained.

I hope my presentation gives you a grasp of the Japanese typeface
design and leads to further discussion.}