Toshi Omagari, Type Designer and Video Game Font Historian
A student of type history, old and new, plies his way as a successful modern type designer, reviving old faces, extracting videogame fonts, and charting a new course.
Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (dts.podtrac.com) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.
Show Notes
Toshi Omagari studied Visual Communication Design at Musashino Art University, Japan, and then got his master's in Typeface Design at the University of Reading in England. From 2012 to 2020, he worked at Monotype, one of the leading digital type foundries, with roots that date back well over a century. During that time, he created his own faces and revivals, including a major reworking and expansion of five typefaces created by Berthold Wolpe. Toshi runs his own font studio now, and lectures and teaches.
His 2019 book, Arcade Game Typography (find it at a bookstore), is an incredible deep dive into the 8-by-8 pixel fonts used in early video game systems and arcade consoles. He also writes exhaustively about type-related issues, such as this recent blog entry about ink traps and light traps.