Although Ajimin has the flavor of hot metal type, it is not intended to be a revival, but a new typeface for display purposes. Like Bodoni, its vertical strokes are clear and heavy and its horizontal strokes are precise and thin. Its elements possess strength and stability.
Ajimin Modern’s elements are more sharply designed than those of Ajimin – the start and finish of vertical strokes are lowered for increased sharpness, and the horizontal strokes are cut vertically at the start and are thinner with a uniform width. Ajimin Modern is a sharp and elegant Mincho-style typeface.
This typeface is designed to be used in larger type sizes (for posters, for example), although it’s legible in smaller sizes. As the type size increases, the elegance of each stroke element becomes more visible.
According to historical records, the Koudouken-Shincho-tai typeface was created in the early Meiji period, when Masayoshi Kanzaki first thought of creating a brush-script typeface, Shouzan Komuro, a calligrapher, wrote the characters, and Munenori Oyamada engraved the steel punches.
The design had was strong and masculine and it stands as one of the greatest masterpieces in Japanese hot metal typeface design. As time went on, the typeface was used less frequently. In 1984, I tried to revive its letter-form structure in the Mincho-style and released the Koudouken kana typeface as one of the Ajioka Shintaro Kana Series for phototypesetting. I have redesigned it again as Ajimin Modern Ko/EB, using Ajimin’s kanji characters.
This font includes top 1,000 kanji characters chosen from character frequency tables made by newspaper companies, publishing houses and linguistic research institutes, plus 206 kana characters and punctuation marks.
Ajimin has the flavor of hot metal type and, like Bodoni, its vertical strokes are clear and heavy and its horizontal strokes are precise and thin. Its elements possess strength and stability. Ajimin is a unique Mincho-style display typeface. Ajimin Modern’s elements are more sharply designed, but that sharpness is balanced by the richness and elegance of the design. Ajimin’s biggest feature is its 10 kana variations, ranging from running-hand-like designs, to revivals of designs from the age of hot metal type, to modern style kana. These variations make Ajimin useful for a wide range of purposes.
Supported languages: German, Spanish, Dutch, English, Polish, Russian, French, Czech, Swedish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Slovenian, Maltese, Arabic, Devanagari, Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Chinese (hk), Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Turkish, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Bengali, Kannada, Cherokee, Thai, Armenian, Belarusian, Danish, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Serbian, Telugu, Malayalam, IPA, Latvian, Chinese Pinyin, Finnish, Filipino, Malay, Croatian, Kazakh, Romanian, Persian, Indonesian, Slovak, Hindi
File Size: 10.59 MB
Release date: April 6, 2021
You can use this font for:
- Design projects: create images or vector artwork, including logos
- Website publishing: create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website
- PDFs: embed fonts in PDFs for viewing and printing
- Video and broadcast: use fonts to create in-house or commercial video content and more
- The fonts are designed to work on MacOS (Apple) and Windows (Microsoft)
Download now