Publisher: WordshapeWhile investigating the history of Onitsuka Tiger's branding and graphic design, I discovered an odd, yet highly attractive piece of customized lettering on the company's ONICK ski boots from the 1970s. Reminiscent of aspects of the typeface Black-Out by Eli Carrico (launched by my type foundry Wordshape), yet vertically compressed with razor-sliced counters and odd stencil aspect that comprises one of the legs of the "K", the ONICK lettering is a prospective source for an interesting modular font.
I right away thought about Ryoichi Tsunekawa as a potential collaborator to bring this piece of lettering to full-fledged life in the contemporary context. Based in Nagoya, Tsunekawa runs an independent type foundry called Dharma Type (http://dharmatype.com/), consisting of three specialized foundry sub-labels: Flat-It, devoted to display lettering; Prop-A-Ganda, a series of font styles inspired by and based upon retro propaganda posters, film posters, retail indication lettering & & advertisements in the early 20th century; and Holiday Type, a series of decorative and retro scripts for vacation use.
Beyond mere charm, Tsunekawa's work is nuanced, in-depth, and available due to its high level of finish. His fonts stand apart from his contemporaries in Latin typeface design in Japan due to his fascination with pop, vernacular and historic lettering from "non-pure" sources- whereas type designers like Kunihiko Okano and Akira Kobayashi have actually spent years examining the essence of Western letterform building and opening the essence of Latin types, Tsunekawa views surface and the uncomfortable nature of his sources as being of value, also.
His irreverence for the official teachings of history imbue his typeface designs with a rugged originality that would be missed by the majority of- glyphs without source designs are rated and approximated, frequently in a manner extremely divergent from what Western eyes would assume. It remains in these minutes that I find large enjoy Tsunekawa's work and what make me most pleased to welcome him aboard Neojaponisme and Onitsuka Tiger's type development project.
His various typefaces show an eclecticism in finish and as holistic systems- Tsunekawa's return email to me about the proposed type task revealed a digital sketch of how a finished typeface household from the source lettering may look, rendered with an effortlessness and dedication to detail that belies a competent craftsperson. More development showed Tsunekawa's rigor- the typeface in development rapidly featured glyphs disregarded by lots of: a complete set of fractions, Eastern European diacritics and accents, remarkable and inferior characters, alternate characters, and custom-made ligatures - all developed with managed, detailed spacing.
Onick is a typeface Tsunekawa ought to be proud of- a tribute to a moment in history rendered in the outright finest style. We are happy to provide it to the world!
Font Family: Onick Regular
