Akko is called after its designer, Linotype's type director Akira Kobayashi, who began working on the type household in early 2010. "I originally prepared to create a sans serif font style with rounded corners," he explains. "But then I became brought in to the concept of an industrial, engineered style, something similar to the rectilinear form of DIN Next ™, however with curved strokes and soft percentages."

By integrating the austere industrial concept with the softer, friendlier elements, Kobayashi handled to create two typeface households in one: Akko and Akko Rounded. Both can be viewed as a stylistic mix of 2 extremes-- the restrained and functional DIN Next and the natural, informal Cooper Black ™.

The characters of Akko and Akko Rounded are identified by simplicity and density; they supplied a stylish option whenever space-saving becomes an issue. For this reason, Akira Kobayashi paid particular attention to the style of the counters and the junctions in between strokes. The softly rounded diagonal strokes in letters such as A, V, K, v and y guarantee that no dark areas are produced within texts. The appearance of text embeded in these fonts is hence homogeneous, uncomplicated and warm.

Akira Kobayashi has actually been working as Type Director at Linotype considering that 2001. He has actually remodelled and improved lots of significant typeface families, collaborating with Adrian Frutiger on Avenir ® Next and with Hermann Zapf on Optima ® Nova, to call but a few of his projects. Published in 2011, the Akko ™ typeface household was the first Kobayashi original in quite a long time-- it has been worth the wait.


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