Shoko Mugikura

Vertical? Horizontal?

TYPO Berlin 2012 sustain | Saturday, 19 May | 4:00 pm | TYPO Show | English

‘Vertical or horizontal?’ – when setting a piece of text in Japanese, this is a question a designer constantly has to ask themselves. Using both orientations is something so normal for us Japanese that not many of us even stop to wonder why this is possible or when and how it all started. Shoko Mugikura explains how two orientations are used in contemporary Japan, and the intriguing history behind it: it has an inseparable connection with the introduction of bilingual typography with Latin script.

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Shoko Mugikura

Shoko Mugikura is a Japanese designer based in Berlin. Alongside working on book design projects, she is running the type design studio Just Another Foundry with Tim Ahrens. Her special interest is the historical development of multi-script (Japanese and European) typography.

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