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Akira Kobayashi

The Japanese type designer Akira Kobayashi was born in 1960. He studied at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo from 1979 to 1983, and six years later followed this up with a calligraphy course at the London College of Printing. His first work experience in type design was at Sha-Ken Co., Ltd., a manufacturer of phototypesetting machines, where he was employed from 1983 to 1989. This was followed by three years at Jiyu-Kobo, Ltd. where he was one of the designers who designed and digitized the Japanese font Hiragino Mincho for Dainippon Screen Co., Ltd. He also designed the six-weight Latin variation Hiragino Roman. From 1993 to 1997 Kobayashi worked at TypeBank Co., Ltd. where he designed Latin alphabets to accompany all 17 of TypeBank’s digital Japanese fonts. Since mid-1997 Kobayashi has worked as a freelance type designer, during which time he has won a number of awards. At the 5th Morisawa International Typeface Competition he received an Honourable Mention for his typeface Socia Oldstyle. He won the Type Directors Club’s first type design competition in 1998 with ITC Woodland, and won Best of Category and Best of Show with Clifford at the first U&lc type design competition the same year. In 1999, Akira was one of the winners at Kyrillitsa ’99 with ITC Japanese Garden and at the 2nd Type Directors Club competition with ITC Silvermoon and ITC Japanese Garden. Other typefaces published to date are: Skid Row (Letraset, 1990), ITC Woodland (ITC, 1997), ITC Scarborough, ITC Japanese Garden, ITC Seven Treasures, ITC Luna, ITC Silvermoon (all ITC, 1998), ITC Magnifico and ITC Vineyard (all ITC, 1999), FF Acanthus and FF Clifford (FSI, 1998/1999), Linotype Conrad (Linotype, 1999) and Cosmiqua (Linotype, 2007). Type Director at Linotype GmbH since 2001, Kobayashi has been re-working classic type families in close collaboration with Hermann Zapf and Adrian Frutiger.

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