Type Card Play Book

The team of Japanese experimental graphic designers who work under the name Dainippon Type Organization have continually reinvented the art of typography. Over and over again, they have taken type beyond its practical dimension, turning it into an active and essentially playful experience. Here they present the reader with a huge, happy, and quite literate blow to the side of the head: a retrospective show of 10 years of font and graphic production, for playing, looking, thinking, and enjoying the alphabet at one's own will. Usefully, the book converts into a set of playing cards, a full set for each typeface, thus allowing the reader to become a player. How to play? Make words out of the individual letters that appear on each card, or make up your own game, inspired by the Dainippon's wacky fonts. The designs which appear in this book are Kurofune (inspired by origami), Bug (insect-like), Katahira (comic book Japanese), Dentype (very analog), YMC (think CMYK), Cube (3-D geometry), Box (imagine a 3-D letter made out of cardboard and then unfolded), and Union Jack (the entire alphabet in the British flag). Dainippon Type Organization was formed in 1994 by Tetsuya Tsukada and Hidechika, who consider themselves typography performers. As their name indicates, many of their ideas are discovered within the elements of Japanese characters, elements which the designers morph into unique typography. Always novel and innovative, Dainippon Type Organization has recently been experimenting with motion typography.