FONT1000
In Japanese font production today, the 7,000 characters in the JIS standard are considered essential. But, do all fonts really need 7,000 characters? In the age of phototypesetting, far fewer characters were needed. FONT1000, a group of independent type designers, started with that simple question. We have selected the minimum 1,000 kanji (ideographic) characters needed for typesetting in Japanese and actively created typefaces and fonts to support it. This 1,000-kanji-character set was selected using character frequency data compiled by newspaper companies, publishing houses and linguistic research organizations, etc., and also includes kana syllabic characters and punctuation marks. FONT1000 was formed in 2001 with 25 designers and 25 typefaces. Today we have 130 typefaces and have grown to include nearly 40 members, making it possible to work on fonts with more characters.