Ans Fonts

These are a series of typography projects since college; the oldest one, Milk in Space, aka “Zygote”, was started during college days at SVA in New York City, which had one of the first versions of Fontographer. Countless other custom typefaces were built during the days of Flyer magazine that could be a repertoire of refreshes. While living in Japan, I made a poster using katakana about mimetic words (like “snip snap” is used in English, yet the Japanese use them very frequently, and they are often doubled, like “kulu kulu” (rolling something), which makes them stand out).

These days it has been so inspirational to be part of the Type Thursday meet-up, where we meet once a month and present letterform-related projects. For those events, I build the typefaces Middleschool (used for headlines on this website), My German Records (turned into a 3‑d Plexiglas sculpture), and the yet unfinished Vaccine among many more to come, because © Type flies when you’re having fonts .

I just stared this one, and made a christmas card as a test and to dabble around with some of the letters and numbers. It’s going to look scienterrific!

The initial idea was a typeface that creates an optical illusion using moiré lines. One day Ida and I engorged on ruffled chips while I was working on the designs and noticed the similarities, hence the name of the typeface. the print is still in production.

the story:
While we lived on the westside of Tokyo our train company was the “Keio” line. Some of the older stations used signage font with a very rounded “e” and a kind-of old style closed-double-loop “g”. No matter how much I searched I could not find a digitized version of the typeface anywhere, so I set out to photograph each letter I could find to build my own. Later on, a type nerd wrote me a page of an old catalog and the typeface used is called “Gona”, and was later re-released and modernized as “Shin-Go, but they changed the old “g” and has an “e” with corners. Also, all the quirky baseline shifts to accommodate for descenders on the signage have been “cleaned” up.
Probably there are not many tourists that travel to “Bubaigawara” just to take a photo of the station sign since it contains a lower case “w”.
After building the full alphabet I noticed it was impossible to match all the different widths, and ended up using a similar typeface as a base and changing the parts that I liked so much.

typeface “New German Records”

the story:
inspired by my friend and super designer Andreas Döhring I build the whole alphabet and changed it to be a little more curved. Then My friend Khairi asked for a music mix for Intermission and I needed a cover.

the story:
Japanese often use words that sound like action. in English examples are “splish splash”, or “bling-bling”. Like they mime the sound of the action.
I heard them very often: “zen zen” (absolutely), “peeka peeka” (shiny), etc.
Here is a list of a few, lined up like stamps:

the story:
I can tell my daughter’s text messages by the number of emoticons, so I build her face out of emoticons.
I counted 50 different shades, each a new emoticon.
If one is counting emoticons as type then this poster is fully typographical as well.
I think Ida is a little mad that I posted this. And I am mean to make fun of her, I know. Hopefully, she will forgive me soon because I love her.

the story:
In one of the studio sessions with my teacher Genevieve Williams, she asked us to design our bucket list ‑Our goals, hopes, or just things to do in the future. I never made one before. My goals seem to change every, I invent a new hobby almost every day. And, I think that list is very personal, some goals are so private that I would rather obscure them.
The first on the list is pretty sure off: Make New Great Work, and from there on it gets decoded…

the story:
My daughter complained that “shut up” is really not an appropriate language. so we changed it to “sit down, and eat your vegetables”.
Initially I designed this typeface for a magazine pitch called “Catch’n Sketch Kitchen” and used it on a few flyers, i.e. the first time the UK group Ninja Tunes came to NYC.

It might have something to do with acid when this typeface was designed.