Partial Catalog
Download page for Necessity 1.0 on FontStruct.
1.0 includes: basic alphabet, basic punctuations, hiragana, and katakana. No special alphabet.
It even comes in Japanese hiragana and katakana!
Approach
Like Morse, I also worked on this last year on FontStruct. The concept with this typeface is to bring down the letterforms to their most essential elements, only showing what is necessary. That is why not the letterforms don’t have the same height, just as most typefaces don’t require letterforms to have the same width, except for monospace typefaces.
The approach to designing this typeface is to pay attention to the elements that make the letterforms, and that primarily involves the intersections and counters (space created by the foreground). Notice below that the lowercase e is five units tall wall the uppercase I is two.
What’s more ridiculous is that in Japanese, the number of intersections and loops in some characters requires the letterform to be seven to eight units tall while other much simpler characters require only two to three.
Hiragana for “a” (ah).
Hiragana for “ku”.
Japanese Markers
Also in Japanese characters, there are markers that change the pronunciations, similar to Latin characters with é and à and whatnot. So I’ve included them in the 1.0 catalog.
Background
I had been thinking about this concept for a few years. I wanted to come up with an experimental typeface that is not based on appearance or the consistent visual relationships among letterforms, but on its ultimate function to show only what is necessary, such as intersections and counters.
When I took a Japanese course in college and learned the hiragana and katakana, I began to think about what this typeface would look like if it includes Japanese characters. There would be a lot more complexities involved in the multiple crosses and loops in some of the characters that force the them to expand to accommodate counters and spaces without mashing two separate pixel strokes next to each other.
And don’t even get me started on Chinese characters. Fortunately FontStruct doesn’t support them.
I’m sure there are Japanese people who will tell me that some of the characters are missing certain hooks or strokes, but the ultimate questions to ask are, “Do you recognize this character? Can it be reduced down even more without losing recognition?” I think it was Albert Einstein who was quoted, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Usage
I actually used this typeface for my Temporary Portfolio 107, or “TP107,” before I created the current portfolio. I modified the type a bit for the logo.
