Keitaro Sakamoto

Planner & Field Manager of Morisawa Type Design Competition

Joined Morisawa Inc. in 2008. Worked in promoting Font products and took charge of start-up projects such as UD Typeface and TypeSquare (Web font). Invited new designs from domestic and overseas for the Morisawa Type Design Competition which was resumed in 2012 after 10 years.

Studied abroad in Rhode Island School of Design, majored in Graphic Design and Digital+Media, as the Research Fellow in 2010. With the experience acquired from RISD, took charge as the project manager of the corporate sites. Participated in design events such as ATypI as the speaker to improve international recognition of Morisawa. Appointed as the guest judge at the Good Design Award 2013.

BITS9 Conference
Keitaro Sakamoto and Tetsuta Onishi
October 12, 2019
Late afternoon Session
3:30pm - 5:00pm
at Grand Ballroom Fl.2, Le Meridien Chiang Mai

“How We Design Japanese Kana.”

In Japan, we use three types of scripts: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana: which are delivered from Kanji. The origin of Hiragana and Katakana were derived from the same letters of Kanji; however, there are some cases that they could be designed in various ways as digital fonts.

In this talk, Keitaro is going to describe the different shapes of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji, as well as how our designers handle and unify the designs of these scripts into the same concepts.