A couple weeks ago my friend, Yoshi, came back from Japan to visit. He and I attended MassArt together, both majoring in Graphic Design. And other than making him say all the swears he could think of in Japanese, I was really interested in the stuff he was designing in Japan. He proceeded to show me a website he’d been working on, and as he explained the design he started fiddling with the kerning in his headlines. Immediately I was like, “how the heck do you kern those guys? (referring to the Japanese characters)” It seems like a completely different task than kerning any letters in the English alphabet. It’s almost like if I had to place icons in a row, or type in Webdings; it would be like kerning those.

He said you have to kern Japanese characters just as you have to kern English letters, but they have obvious differences, such as each character is much larger and more complex than an “A” or a “J”, therefore sometimes need a little more space between each one. Then he went on to talk about Japanese typefaces, and how they have serif and sans serif and all the same crazy display fonts as the English alphabet does; which is something I have never even thought about, but is flippin awesome.

The Japanese written language is much different than English, while they do have characters based on sound, but they also have characters just for nouns and verbs which are primarily based on Chinese characters. Here are some great sites that talk more about the Japanese written language, and specifically about kerning for web and print:

www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?111
www.kanji.org/kanji/japanese/writing/outline.htm
www.linguanaut.com/japanese_alphabet.htm

I’ll have to ask Yoshi what he thinks of the Fabreeka site Silverscape did when it launches, since one of the languages it’s in is Chinese which probably uses some of the same typographic principles as the Japanese written language. I’m sure he’ll be pleasantly surprised and impressed, and if not, I’ll just whip out one of the Japanese swears he taught me.