Lately, I have had the great pleasure of becoming friends with Kunihiko Okano, a really amazing type designer here in Tokyo.  Okano-san launched his Shotype design office a few months ago, an independent design office which will quickly become one of the top firms in Tokyo. He has experience in logo design, packaging design, and is a really gifted type designer.

We met up the other day for coffee along with Yutaka Ozawa, a really skilled type designer and developer/programmer and Akira Yoshino, an editor at Kobunsha, a major Japanese publisher and frequent contributor to MyFonts.com's "What the Font?" forums.

Kunihiko is going to release a number of typefaces over the next few years that will establish him as a great new voice in contemporary type design. I was lucky to have the chance to review a number of the projects that he has been working on and refining for years. He is poised to release a number of classically-inspired typefaces that will really stand out in today's market. Personally inspired by the works of Zapf and Frutiger, Okano-san is ready to take the type world by storm.

He is also an amazing calligrapher, having trained at the MG School of Latin Calligraphy in Tokyo. Kunihiko has a sensitivity for Latin letterforms and Roman numerals that is rarely seen.

Kunihiko expanded the Axis type family to include a condensed and compressed version, adding small caps and italics to the family during his time working with TypeProject.

 If you are ever in need of a finely crafted calligraphic logo from scratch, Kunihiko Okano is the man to contact!