TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Thu Sep 10 20:56:59 EDT 2015

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

LUC DEVROYE

ABOUT

Ryoko Nishizuka

Senior designer at adobe Systems in Tokyo. 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 had 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.

Behance link.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Ryoko Nishizuka
Behance page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Japanese type design ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿