Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Fontendo, the show where we identify & document
fonts, obscure and otherwise, from video games and other media.
Today we will be discussing the design and development process behind the fonts used
in Nintendo’s Splatoon series.
In game development studios the responsibility of font selection usually falls on the User
Interface and Experience team, with input from graphic designers.
In most cases this simply involves acquiring the appropriate commercial licenses to use
a font in a video game from a font foundry, as font production can be a time consuming
and costly endeavour which most companies would understandably not want to factor into
their budget when many great typefaces can be outsourced.
When it comes to video games, special consideration is given to quick legibility at small sizes,
and uniform localisation, so a typeface which supports as many different languages as possible
is preferred, so that design aesthetics can be upheld between regional versions.
Nintendo is no stranger to interesting font usage. Nintendo itself like other companies
outsources its fonts from mostly Japanese font foundries,
primarily Fontworks, Morisawa (Japan’s largest and leading Type Foundry), and Dynacomware,
a Taiwanese Type foundry which produces a variety of fonts for primarily Asian audiences.
Their typefaces have been extensively used by Nintendo and other companies
when searching for Chinese language fonts.
However, out of these three foundries, Nintendo seems to have a very close relationship to
Fontworks.
Pretty much all fonts from Nintendo games which have become synonymous them in the west,
have been designed and supplied by Fontworks, and on occasion, Nintendo works directly with
them to make modifications to certain fonts specifically to meet Nintendo’s needs for
a project.
Splatoon’s development was one such case.
Nintendo UI and UX designer Mariko Tachibana was one of the principal designers working
on Splatoon’s User Interface and Font design, and has detailed her experience of being in charge
of Splatoon’s typeface design in an article for the Japanese website ‘Careerhack’.
Tachibana originally wanted to make a simpler font and interface which did not standout,
before Art Director Seita Inoue said that he wanted a ‘fresh UI’ for the game.
This was when she became conscious of the need for a font which was both ‘fresh’
and ‘easily understandable’. Easy to understand UI but fresh as art.
“When thinking about the UI design of Splatoon”, Tachibana said, “the first thing we were
conscious of was the comparison of different interface designs.
For example, we used the UI designs from the "Super Mario" series and other famous titles
to come up with ideas and find the right one for Splatoon.
By comparing it with the finished UI design, we can easily find quality indicators and freshness.
I think it was easier to discover the Splatoon-ness of the game by constantly comparing and working with it.
The team was off to a pretty good start with
designing the UI and the look and feel of the game.
It is at this point that normally, the developers would start looking for a suitable font to
go along with their plans, but the Splatoon team ran into a brick wall:
They were unable to find a suitable ready-made font which satisfied their needs for both
‘freshness’ and ‘readability’.
The problem with more ‘fresh’ typefaces which may have been considered, is that they
are usually ‘Display’ fonts which are not suitable for reading longer, smaller texts.
One recent example of this is Animal Crossing New Horizon’s Chinese localisation, which
uses a display font supplied by Dynacomware known as Huákāng xīn zōngyìtǐ W9, a
font which Chinese users have complained about for it’s out of place aesthetic & reading difficulty.
Splatoon’s team then decided to start from scratch, proclaiming:
“If you don’t have a font, just make one”.
And so, the process of creating an in-house font began.
In designing Splatoon’s main UI font, the first point to be considered, was that the
typeface must be developed so that it perfectly fits the in-game world and aesthetics.
Tachibana got a feel early on for the type of font that she wanted to create, making
a conscious effort create quick sketches to formulate a solid idea.
“I think it’s a good idea when in a small team with less time to show your concepts
to as many people as possible, including the art director, to make sure that you’re taking
things in the right direction, even if what you have is only a vague image.”
Using the rough sketches as a guide the font was tweaked over time to make it more suitable
for the final product.
The thickness of the characters was inspired by the perceived power portrayed by the thick
logos used in sports branding, with some added fluid lines to include a hint of squid-ness.
This style of typeface in actuality is more common than you might think.
This is what is called a ‘showcard’ font, which is a style derived from the showcard
models prepared for lettering artists in the 1920s and 30s.
This practice was an offshoot of sign-painting which started with the industrial revolution
and the start of the modern glass-front store, which required a way to easily rotate storefront
advertising, so showcard artists were hired to paint temporary signs.
This unique American style later became frequently used in branding and advertising for it’s
strong striking look which was said to make people more likely to buy a product.
An offshoot of this showcard style later developed into the POP or Point of Purchase style which
is responsible for Pop Happiness and Pop Joy, two other Fontworks fonts which are well known
for their appearance in Mario games.
Today, Showcard Gothic by Jim Parkinson is the most well-known Showcard font, owing to
its inclusion on most Windows computers.
He also designed Dreamland, another more casual showcard font
which was used in the European Tomodachi Life logo,
and looks extremely similar to the lettering in the Yoshi’s Island logo,
though Dreamland was released 4 years after it.
Going back to the first Splatoon, Kana and Latin characters were the main focus of this
font design project, though that left a bit of an issue for the UI team:
Japanese is a language with three alphabets, and the one which had not been touched yet,
was the toughest to design a font for: Kanji.
With thousands of characters required for even a basic comprehension of the language,
along with their more complex forms, they are responsible for why Asian typography is
a much more time consuming and expensive task, and why on average East-Asian fonts are much
more expensive than their western counterparts.
For this momentous task, Nintendo turned to their close font partner, Fontworks, a well-established
Japanese type foundry which employs many industry veterans who have created some of Japan’s most used fonts.
Through Fontworks’ permission and assistance, it was decided to take and adapt Kanji from
Fontworks’ ‘Rowdy’ typeface, which had previously been used in the Anime ‘Shirobako’,
the Japanese ‘My Pokémon Ranch’ logo,
The English logo of mobile game ‘Puzzle & Dragons’,
and the Japanese localisation of Banjo-Tooie on the Nintendo 64.
The first time this font made an appearance in a first party Nintendo game however was
not Splatoon, but was in fact in Super Mario Sunshine in 2002, as though hard to see, Rowdy
was used in the game’s guidebook.
Rowdy is closely related to the Rodin font family, a widely used font in Japan seen as
Japan’s Helvetica due to its common use.
Rowdy in fact uses Rodin glyphs as a starting point, before they were modified with a heavy
push to the right, now featuring a high-uneven contrast with thick lines on one side, creating
a dynamic, lively and crisp feeling.
This dynamic design is what resulted in its selection to be used as part of Splatoon’s font.
After every glyph was created, some character widths and kerning were adjusted when it was
pointed out that they were too difficult to read.
This is evidenced in the Kanji borrowed from Rowdy, which when compared side-by-side with
their Splatoon counterparts, have been adjusted slightly to make them easier to read in-game,
and to make them fit in better with the kana and letters designed from scratch.
And thus, Splatoon’s first font was created.
However, one thing worth noting is that while Splatoon’s font appears to be entirely original,
there are a lot of similarities with other fonts which cannot be overlooked.
Firstly, while it appears that only the Kanji were directly taken from Rowdy Standard, many
of the Kana also have an extremely similar design.
Obviously being a showcard font itself, Splatoon’s font will resemble the many of its kind, but
in particular its uppercase Latin characters seem to be almost identical to the font
'Rat Fink Gothic', also designed by Jim Parkinson.
It is part of the Rat Fink series by House Industries, which happens to contain
Rat Fink Heavy, the typeface used for the English Animal Crossing Logo.
So perhaps it was only the Kana that were designed from scratch by the Splatoon team.
A custom filled version of Fink Gothic has been used by Nintendo before in the past for
promotional uses, and this same custom filled version was also used as the main typeface
of the ‘Ice-Age’ movie franchise.
Moving on to Splatoon 2’s font, Mariko Tachibana
explained the reason for creating a new font for the sequel, explaining that
“There was a problem with the Bold font from the previous game because of the increase
in information needing to be conveyed to the player."
In addition, the new characters and new modes have a cooler image than
the cuteness of the previous game”.
To remedy this, the team changed the font to a slimmer design to match the new cooler image.
Tachibana said “We went from cherishing organic lines to aiming for more graphic design lines.”
Though Splatoon 1’s font still makes appearances in-game, this new font went on to become the
main UI font, and much like its predecessor, Fontworks also had a hand in its inception.
This time Kanji were taken from Fontworks’ Kurokane typeface, with small modifications
being made like before to enhance readability,
and to match the aesthetics of the other parts of the typeface.
But like with Splatoon’s first font, it appears that only the Kana and lowercase Latin
letters were designed by the Nintendo team, with the Kanji from Fontworks’ Kurokane,
and possibly the Uppercase letters taken from another House Industries typeface:
Rat Fink Sans.
Some uppercase letters are identical, with others only slightly tweaked.
It is very possible that while the Splatoon team couldn’t find a font suitable for their
needs, they liked the Fink fonts enough to use them as a base to inform the rest of their design.
It all worked in the end, with Splatoon 1’s font especially becoming recognised as a ‘Squid-like Font’.
This along with other UI elements being used to sell splatoon merchandise has led Tachibana
to reckon that this is all solid proof that "UI design" contributed to the establishment
of Splatoon's worldview and its popularity.
Though the finished in-house font was never officially released, you can find all of the
fonts mentioned in this video with links to purchase them in the description of this video.
Unfortunately for legal reasons I cannot share free download links for typefaces which aren’t
free, but there are datamined and recompiled
versions of Splatoon 1 and 2’s fonts out there on the internet.
However, I will put links to some fan re-creations of the fonts below.
There is also a link to a similar looking show-card style font family from the
Japanese foundry MODI, called Memoir.
In this family the font ‘Memoir Square’, while released after Splatoon, greatly resembles
its Japanese Kana, and makes for a suitable free replacement.
I will also be leaving some links below to more information about the fonts featured
in this video which I’ve previously posted on the Fontendo Twitter account.
And if you liked this first episode of Fontendo, be sure to subscribe for more, and follow the Fontendo
Twitter account on which I have been posting daily font information and trivia
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Thank you very much for watching.
[English language subtitles by Kaihatsu]