TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Mar 25 15:38:09 EDT 2024

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LUC DEVROYE


ABOUT







Ryoko Nishizuka

Senior designer at Adobe Systems in Tokyo, b. 1972, Fukushima, who graduated from Musashino Art University in 1995, and began working as a graphic designer at a design studio. In 1997, Ryoko joined Adobe. She was involved in the development of the Kozuka Mincho and Kozuka Gothic typefaces designed by Masahiko Kozuka.

Kazuraki is an Opentype kanji font developed in 2009-2010 by Adobe for script applications. The Kazuraki design is inspired by the calligraphy of 12th century artist and writer Fujiwara-no-Teika, who is considered one of the greatest poets in Japan's history. It features vertical ligatures. Designed by Ryoko Nishizuka (Tokyo), it was produced by Masataka Hattori (Adobe Systems, Tokyo) and Ken Lunde (Adobe, San Jose, CA) under the management of Taro Yamamoto (Tokyo) and David Lemon (San Jose, CA). Kazuraki won an award at the TDC2 2010 type competition.

In 2002, Ryoko Nishizuka won the Morisawa Award for type design for Teika, a precursor of the 2009 Adobe font. Morisawa commented at the time: Turning superb calligraphy into a typeface requires surmounting many obstacles, not least of which is getting characters of differing size to line up correctly. The designer here controls the direction of the brush strokes in order to give the typeface a stability in horizontal typesetting, and in that coherence one can find the traces of her struggle. The ligature in vertical typesetting has also been given full attention, and the result is a generally excellent work. Specimen.

Ryoko Nishizuka, who designed the Ryo typeface families in Gothic, Text and Display styles. Adobe writes this about her: Ryoko Nishizuka graduated from Musashino Art University in 1995, and began working at Morisawa&Company, a leading type foundry and manufacturer of digital typesetting systems in Japan. Next, she decided to work as graphic designer at a design studio. But her main interest was always in typeface design. In 1997, Ryoko joined Adobe. She has been involved in the development of the Kozuka Mincho and Gothic typefaces designed by Masahiko Kozuka. In 1999, Ryoko received an honorable mention for her typeface "Branch Letter" at the Morisawa Awards International Typeface Design Competition. In 2002, her calligraphic typeface "Teika" won the Silver Prize at the same Morisawa competition, which was later expanded and refined to become Kazuraki, which is being heralded as the first fully- proportional OpenType Japanese font.

In 2003, Ryoko created the Ryo Text and Ryo Display "kana" typeface families. The Ryo Text and Display families are composed of nine sub-set Japanese "kana" OpenType fonts for eight different weights. The brightness emitted from the Ryo typeface is based on her original interpretation of traditional styles of "kana" calligraphy and type design. Kazuraki then consumed much of Ryoko's design effort, and was subsequently released in 2009.

She designed and created ideographs (kanjis) for the Source Han Sans fonts released in 2014 by Adobe and Google for Japanese, Chinese and Korean. She led the design of the glyphs for ideographs, Japanese kana, and other Japanese characters in Source Han Serif (2017).

Designer of Ten Mincho (2017), a Japanese typeface design from Adobe Originals. Ten Mincho also features a full set of Latin glyphs, collectively known as Ten Oldstyle and designed by Robert Slimbach. Prominent in Ten Mincho are the dynamic characteristics of hand-written characters, as well as a stroke formation style that is typically seen in the Kawaraban printed newspapers from the mid to late Edo period (1603–1863) in Japan.

Designer of White On Black VF (2019), a variable font with just one kanji glyph demonstrating an issue related to the non-zero winding rule used for rendering fonts. The issue is especially problematic when negative glyphs are reversed out of a positive background shape. The weight axis shows how the technique for avoiding the problem with static fonts by removing overlaps is not a good solution for variable fonts because the topology of overlapping shapes may change across variations. The antisymmetric font, Black On White VF, is made with the same shapes but with an additional circular path, showing how the issue is not present with positive-on-negative glyphs. The fonts were produced by Ken Lunde using a glyph designed by Ryoko Nishizuka.

Behance link. Typekit interview.

Speaker at ATypI 2014 in Barcelona and at ATypI 2019 in Tokyo.

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INTERNAL LINKS
Type design in Japan ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Variable fonts ⦿








file name: Ken Lunde Ryoko Nishizuka Frank Griesshammer Source Han Serif 2017


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Ryo Text Plus N Extra Light 2011


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Robert Slimbach Ten Mincho 2017


file name: Adobe Ten Mincho 2021


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Robert Slimbach Ten Mincho 2017b


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Robert Slimbach Ten Mincho 2017c


file name: Source Han Serif Korean 2017


file name: Source Han Serif Simplified Chinese 2017


file name: Source Han Serif Traditional Chinese 2017


file name: Ken Lunde Adobe Kazuraki Medium 2009 Large


file name: Ken Lunde Adobe Kazuraki Medium 2009


file name: Kazuraki Kanji Glyphs 2009


file name: Kazuraki Latin Glyphs 2009


file name: Kazuraki Sample 2009


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Kazuraki 2009


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Kazuraki 2009i


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Kazuraki 2009j


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Kazuraki 2009k


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Adobe Faces 2010


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Ryo Display I I


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Kazuraki 2009h


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka pic


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka 2019


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Pic 2019


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Pic 2019


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Pic


file name: Ryoko Nishizuka Pic







Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html