As mentioned in the development story, the TP Apricot has different people in charge of hiragana and katakana. I believe that in many Japanese fonts, one person is in charge of both hiragana and katakana. Taking on unconventional challenges, such as Latin-led development and dividing kana responsibilities, is also a feature of TP Apricot.

I was in charge of hiragana, and joined TP Apricot design midway through. By the time I joined midway, the base of the Latin was already complete and the kanji design had been finalized. For a while, we divided up the work on kanji (since kanji involves a large number of characters, there’s still a lot of work even after the design is finalized), but there was no need to worry about the policy from scratch at this point.

When I started prototyping hiragana, I began to have trouble with the design. Even though I did some work with kanji, I had only a superficial understanding of the trial and error behind the design, and especially in the beginning, I strongly felt that I couldn’t quite get it right. I received explanations from the lead members from various perspectives, and I kept revising the prototype by combining the Latin, kanji, katakana, and hiragana, trying this and that.

I think the biggest factor that helped us settle on the design was the katakana prototype. Shortly after I began working on the hiragana prototype, the designer in charge of Latin and kanji was also assigned to handle katakana, and the katakana prototype was shared with me. Compared to hiragana, which vacillated between Latin and kanji and occasionally went off track, katakana still felt like it blended well with fonts. That became the guideline, and the design of the hiragana also converged.

I still sometimes wonder if I could have proceeded without so many detours, but the design of Apricot’s punctuation marks and symbols gave me an early opportunity to put that reflection into practice. I covered that topic in another article, so please check that out as well.

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

T.I