LIM Corp., Ltd. commercialized the universal design font by the joint research project with Chiba University. "Since reading Japanese in small liquid crystal display screens, such as a mobile phone, has increased, I would like to create the typeface for a display which makes vision stress reduce." Research and development started in such a concept.

In 2005, the third generation mobile phone was released one after another from each company, and the opportunity to read a character with a mobile phone increased rapidly. From these days, the younger age group's communication with e-mail increased more than the voice, and it became impossible for seniors to also part with a mobile phone daily.

Although the younger age group is strong from vision stress, since the amount of information in e-mail increased, there is a tendency to read a lot of characters displayed on one screen in smaller size. Although seniors read characters in bigger size, since they are weak from vision stress, these stress of each youth and seniors is the maximum in modern society. The application which reads a character with a mobile phone these days is not only e-mail. Various informational services, such as news, stock quotations, weather information, and SNS, are developed. And recently, the digital book service which can buy and read a book with a mobile phone is growing quickly.

In the future, desire of hoping to read many characters comfortably on a small screen will become still stronger. Universal design font, Uni-Type® for screen display is the completely new typeface produced with such a historical backdrop.

The purpose differs between the typeface for printing, and the typeface for screen display. The design concept for improving the visibility of each character is more important than designs with good appearance. From the results of an investigation that about 70% of the characters used for e-mail etc. are non-kanji characters, Uni-Type® - the design concept of this typeface is the visibility of hiragana and katakana - were born. After this, the design concept, the development process, etc. of Uni-Type® are described, and it is presented how our company has implemented UD.

First of all, before explaining how the typeface design was developed, it is explained "why we chose the method of not developed in-house but industry-university cooperation?"
Usually, typeface is born by a designer person's subjective sense of values. However, since this typeface has a concept named a universal design, it needs to be a design which is not based on a designer's subjectivity but aims at the function of readability. So, we thought that reliable objective appraisal became the main of typeface development. Then, the theme "What is readability?" became important.

In several discussion about this theme, the visibility of the voiced sound mark and semivoiced sound mark in the non-kanji character design which is a character unique with Japanese has appeared. In creating new typeface named Uni-Type® this time, in the scene where it will be actually used, the readability in small liquid crystal displays, such as a mobile phone, is the most important. 60 to 70% of the characters usually used in e-mail are non-kanji characters. We thought that the visibility of a voiced sound mark and a semivoiced sound mark, such as "Paris or Bali?" or "path or bus?", was especially important in these. We began the design development from the process which designed the shapes of a voiced sound mark and a semivoiced sound mark in these non-kanji characters with importance on functionality in the unprecedented way of thinking.


The above figure expresses each role in the Uni-Type® project.