Scribble at 2022-10-15 21:46:54 Last modified: 2022-10-16 09:57:27

In the afternoon on Saturday, we had visited to home of my father in Ikuno ward of Osaka city with foodstuffs bought at Gyomu supermarket. I found an interesting signboard on the way home of father and that one used Japanese characters of edging style.

In general, such an edging character will make sense on the background especially having a low contrast with a color for the character, and this sign board looks pretty nice to keep a good look of characters with their background. I was impressed at it, and then a question came to me: when an edging style of typeface was invented? Who did start to use an edging for characters from an idea to keep a difference of colors between the front and back (whether the contrast is high or low)?

But the most people will be hard to search things related to such a style and idea as a historical theme. One reason must be a lack of official term to call such a style on a lot of Japanese web pages where they put naive or silly explanations on behalf of "professional designers." And the second reason is that words like "edging" or "facing" can be returned from automatic translation at Google or others, but most professional typeface designers do not seem to use such words to make an edge on typeface. I am lucky to have a good resource written by Juzo Takaoka who wrote a book entitled "European Typefaces," and he tells me a name of this style in typography is "outline." (please keep in mind a fact that someone uses "outline font" to stand for "vector font.")