Morisawa
When the Japanese type foundry, Morisawa, decided to create their first Latin typeface, they enlisted the venerable (and MacArthur genius) Matthew Carter to design it. We were then hired to create a type specimen to showcase the new font. The full family of fonts consists of five main styles—Serif, Sans, Slab, Soft, and Script—each with three optical weights (text, display, and banner) and eight thickness weights. All together there are over 200 fonts in the set. To showcase the full set we designed five booklets; for each booklet we imagined a character and hired editors and writers to create texts that reflected that personality.
The covers show enlarged and blurred letterforms in a color palette that extends and blurs across each booklet.
One aspect of designing a type specimen book is to show the fonts in action. To do this we designed *a lot* of objects and ephemera—book jackets, posters, matchbooks, buttons—and then had the pieces photographed to be used in the booklets. It was a bit like designing your cake and eating it too.
Finally, we designed a website for the font, using the texts and images that had been created for the booklets. The site uses the side of the browser for the navigation between the different styles.
