Akko is named after its designer, Linotype's type director Akira Kobayashi, who started dealing with the type household in early 2010. "I originally planned to design a sans serif font style with rounded corners," he discusses. "However then I ended up being attracted to the idea of a commercial, engineered design, something comparable to the rectilinear form of DIN Next ™, however with curved strokes and soft percentages."

By combining the austere industrial concept with the softer, friendlier elements, Kobayashi managed to produce 2 typeface families in one: Akko and Akko Rounded. Both can be viewed as a stylistic blend of 2 extremes-- the restrained and functional DIN Next and the organic, casual Cooper Black ™.

The characters of Akko and Akko Rounded are characterized by simpleness and density; they supplied a stylish service whenever space-saving becomes a problem. For this factor, Akira Kobayashi paid specific attention to the design of the counters and the junctions between strokes. The softly rounded diagonal strokes in letters such as A, V, K, v and y ensure that no dark areas are produced within texts. The look of text set in these fonts is thus homogeneous, straightforward and warm.

Akira Kobayashi has been working as Type Director at Linotype given that 2001. He has remodelled and improved lots of significant typeface families, teaming up with Adrian Frutiger on Avenir ® Next and with Hermann Zapf on Optima ® Nova, to name however a few of his projects. Published in 2011, the Akko ™ font family was the first Kobayashi original in quite some time-- it has been worth the wait.


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