Among the full-width symbols in TP Apricot, the glyphs for Cyrillic and Greek characters have somewhat distinctive shapes.

These characters are not often seen in everyday life. Cyrillic and Greek characters are fundamentally designed for typesetting Russian and Greek, but there are limited situations, in which full-width glyphs designed for Japanese typesetting are used on a daily basis. Some of you may have seen these on the internet as part of emoticons.

These full-width Cyrillic and Greek glyphs are a common source of frustration for designers in typeface design. Especially with typefaces like TP Apricot, which have their own unique personalities that defy existing categories, handling them feels even more difficult.
Although these are full-width glyphs for Japanese text, the nature of the characters themselves is closer to Latin, and they have many similarities with scripts derived from Latin characters. Therefore, we basically based our design process on Latin designs.

TP Apricot’s Latin characters have a design that strongly evokes the nuances of handwriting. For that reason, for Cyrillic and Greek characters, we produced character shapes that have more of a brush-written feel, rather than the shapes seen in existing Mincho and Gothic typefaces.

Similar to Latin, we used Cyrillic and Greek character shapes drawn with various writing instruments as a reference, applied our own arrangements, and developed a design that matches the image of TP Apricot. The designers don’t actually understand Russian or Greek, but they work hard to find shapes that look as natural as possible.

While this shape may seem unfamiliar, we hope you can appreciate the playful spirit unique to TP Apricot.

Apart from the behind-the-scenes story here, the development story page provides detailed information about the design process and concept behind TP Apricot. Please take a look.

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