Add
codeman38 has another Japanese foundry for us: Add. Like Digital Dream Design, they have a nice selection of free vector and bitmap fonts (if you aren’t sick of those yet). Check out Cityboy and Loops, as well as all the pixel fonts.
Cody made a point that I agree with completely: it’s incredible that so many of these Japanese foundries with amazing free fonts are flying completely under the radar. But why? It’s not like they’re hard to find. Are people put off by Japanese sites? Is a .jp domain name and the chance of some garbled characters really that scary? Especially when the payoff (tons of great free fonts) is potentially huge?
Maybe. But I think the answer is simple: nobody wants to look too hard. I’m sure most people searching for free fonts don’t go beyond the second or third page of spam-clogged Google results or the same old heavily-linked sites we’ve all seen.
But that’s why you come here, right? So it all works out.
56 Comments
JOE / March 18, 2005 @ 12:39 pm
A lot of people are terrified of the garbled characters. I had a support call where the user was convinced that their machine had a virus because the visited a Japanese website and the words were not in english.
El Duque / March 19, 2005 @ 9:20 am
Garbled characters? On a font site?
Sweet.
mico / March 20, 2005 @ 10:05 am
I haven’t seen a discussion about the illegibility (to my eyes) of many alphabetic fonts created by some Asian designers.
Seems to me that this phenomenon derives from their approach to glyphs from a purely design standpoint. I’m not certain, but I suspect this approach affects the legibility of Japanese fonts to a lesser degree than it does for alphabetic fonts.
I hasten to say that there are exceptions to this on both sides: highly legible Japanese-designed alphabetic fonts and extremely illegible (grunge?) alphabetic fonts designed by Westerners.
Any thoughts?
Stephen / March 20, 2005 @ 1:24 pm
mico - Interesting point and I think that’s often true among the freebie fonts from both cultures.
Of course there are always exceptions. Akira Kobayashi is a Japanese designer who has excelled at creating extremely readable latin alphabets. FF Clifford and FF Acanthus are two of my favorite text faces.
codeman38 / November 4, 2005 @ 6:59 pm
You *really* need to do something about the comment/trackback spam around here.
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