Hello. This is the courtyard of the design department.
My main job was web design, but now I also serve as the editor-in-chief of the Monosasu site, so my responsibilities are very diverse.
One thing that both designers and editors-in-chief are concerned about is the design of "text" in various media. Even though we say "text" in one word, designers have to think about many things: "readability of text," "how the text looks as a picture," "how the text looks in terms of its meaning," "the relationship between the text and the picture," and so on.
The way it is presented also changes depending on where it is exposed. It is different between paper and the web, and even within the same paper, it is different between magazines and newspapers. On the web, it also changes depending on whether it is a corporate site, a web magazine, or a news site.
The topic of character design is endless. Today, I would like to talk about the characteristics of the Japanese language and typesetting in order to organize my thoughts about it.
Do you want to enjoy a variety of character combinations, or do you want a more streamlined and convenient font?
As you know, Japanese is made up of three types of characters: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. The alphabet is made up of straight lines and regular curves, so it is easy to design rules for typesetting, but Japanese is quite difficult because there is a large difference in the number of strokes and the shapes are diverse. Japanese sentences are like a plethora of characters with diverse personalities, and I once again realize how difficult it is to line up all these unique characters beautifully in a row.
For example, if two kanji characters with many strokes and a high black density are next to each other, there should be a small gap between them. Conversely, if there are many dense characters with large pockets (the space inside the strokes that make up the character) next to each other, the gap should be narrower.
The space between adjacent letters is considered based on the density of black when the letters are viewed flat, so there are all kinds of possible combinations, so it is necessary to look at each one carefully.
The middle line shows the area of space between characters. The third line shows the width of the space between characters. Characters with vertical lines on the side, such as "日", require a wider margin, while characters with a wider space between them have a narrower space.
The "Kana Moji Movement" arose during the Taisho era in an attempt to make the inefficient Japanese characters more rational, like those in Western writing. This was a movement to create all documents using only katakana, which are phonetic characters with one sound per character.
One of the things this movement achieved was, for example, the efficiency of typewriters, which were just beginning to become popular at the time. Western typewriters could create documents by rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet, but Japanese typewriters at the time could only handle 2,400 characters. It was extremely inefficient. If it was made using only katakana, it would only require 50 keys.
Japanese typewriter with kanji characters
By Tetsuo Hashimoto (http://www.geocities.jp/kyo_oomiya/my.html) (http://www.geocities.jp/kyo_oomiya/jpntype.html) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By the way, if only katakana is used, the meaning will be unclear, so we have made it a rule to put spaces between words (Wakachi writing).
If you use a katakana font with uniform character width, it will be easier to design rules for spacing between characters and produce beautiful typesetting. Documents can be created much more efficiently than with Japanese using kanji.
However, sentences written entirely in katakana, even if written in a hiragana style, have no intonation throughout the sentence and are difficult to understand at a glance. So why is it that by mixing in kanji, the meaning becomes suddenly easier to understand?
Next, I would like to think about visual communication using kanji and the rhythm of words.
Rhythm of words as visual communication
Japanese is a complex language that combines kanji, hiragana, and katakana. To people from other countries, it may seem like a confusing and inefficient language, but once you get used to it, you'll find it's surprisingly useful and easy to create a rhythm in visual terms.
Kanji are pictographic characters, which are concrete and visual. The ability to convey meaning at a glance makes them an extension of pictograms.
In that sense, I think Japanese, which uses kanji, is a language that allows for visual communication.
If visual communication is possible, that is, if meaning can be conveyed pictorially, then character design begins at the point of writing. If you are conscious of how your message will be conveyed to the reader, then surely it is necessary to consider the visual rhythm when writing a document?
For example, the impression given by a sentence with the same meaning can change depending on the combination and balance of kanji and hiragana, as well as the location of punctuation marks and paragraph breaks.
A is an example that uses as many kanji as possible and keeps punctuation to a minimum.
B is an example that uses a lot of hiragana and includes as many punctuation marks as possible.
Neither is correct, but each style of writing gives a different impression. A is more formal, while B gives a more relaxed impression.
Let's simplify this extremely. If we replace the densely packed kanji characters with many strokes with a solid black square (■) and the hiragana characters with fewer strokes with a white circle (◯), it will look like this:
A has more black and is denser, while B is lighter.
In terms of the apparent rhythm, although A has fewer punctuation marks, the blocks of kanji in ■ look like words, so there is a rhythm to it. Meanwhile, B is mostly hiragana and has fewer word blocks, but the use of commas throughout gives it a rhythm.
In this way, the amount of kanji used in a sentence and the way punctuation is used can change how the message is conveyed and how communication takes place.
On the other hand, when designing a document, you design the margins of text to create visual rhythm.
- Letter spacing
- Word Spacing
- Line space
- Space between columns
These margins are designed to suit the media, purpose, and content in which the ad will be published.
When combined with the margins of a document and the writer's choice of characters as mentioned earlier, it is possible to add rhythm to the entire text, making it easier to read and bringing it closer to the intended communication.
"Concrete Poetry" is a typesetting art that goes beyond readability to express
Beyond typesetting and design as visual communication that takes readability into consideration, there is also the world of more advanced expression: art.
"Concrete poetry" is one of them. "Concrete poetry" is poetry (concrete poetry) that gives visual meaning to letters as if they were material objects through the use of typographical lettering and word combinations.
In terms of appearance alone, the ASCII art seen on sites like 2channel may be similar in some ways (although I don't think they are synonymous unless the characters used have meaning).
For example, I think that the poster for a reforestation campaign designed by Ryuichi Yamashiro, "Mori (Forest) and Hayashi (Forest)" (1955), which I saw a long time ago and was impressed by (you can see the work on this blog ), is also an example of concrete poetry. The large and small kanji characters for "forest" and "hayashi" (forest) are spread all over the place, evoking an image of lush greenery more than the meaning of the words.
German artist Ferdinand Kriwet creates visual typesetting works, such as his "visible texts" ( a selection of his works can be seen on Limarart's website ), which consist of typography in the form of letters arranged on multiple layers of circles.
Also famous in this field is the poet Kitazono Katsue ( some of his works can be found on the blog of the used bookstore Parujina ). As for more recent poets, some of the interactive poems by Saihate Tahi might also fall into this category.
Additionally, I think the typesetting of Salvador Plasencia's "The Paper People," which was previously mentioned at the Monosasu Book Club, is also an example of concrete poetry.
These works place words (poetry) on the canvas just as if they were paintings, and create new meanings from the words and shapes.
In this way, typesetting exists in a world of expression that goes beyond readability.
lastly
We started by talking about the Japanese language's diverse characters, then moved on to its typography and the rhythm of words, and finally to the world of typography expression.
At this stage, it is not realistic to control all character spacing on a website.
You set common letter spacing, line spacing, and margins, and then you just fill in the text. You can't expect much in the way of character restriction processing. Fonts often differ depending on the device, and in terms of designing characters, there is less control than with paper.
However, each medium has different display characteristics. Designers will continue to explore ways to display text that suit the characteristics of each medium within the given conditions. And in the future, typesetting for the web will continue to change rapidly depending on technology and devices.
Either way, Japanese characters themselves are a complex, rich, and visual language. I think that designing Japanese probably starts from the writing stage. I would like to be involved in editing and design work from that perspective.
NAKANIWA Keiko