Calligraphy and Lettering – Yajima Syuichi

I finally decided to create a blog. Yay! I will try to share some of my activities or random things I like and, you know, maybe some useless thoughts that can’t fit in 140 characters. Oh, no! So basically it’s just like any other blogs out there? Well, yeah… I’m not going to argue that.

I’m not sure what should be my first post here, so I’m just going to share you the very first book that introduced me to the world of design. It’s a typography book that was written by my late great grand father, Yajima Syuichi. My mother showed this book to me and some of his paintings probably when she noticed I developed an abnormal amount of love to crayons. I was only 8 years old and as a kid who liked to draw ballerinas dancing in pink dresses, a book that tells stories about how beautiful letters were made actually couldn’t steal my attention that much. As I grew up I began to grow interest in what he did for a living. When I finally got my first job as a graphic designer she gave all his stuff that she owned to me.

To be honest I haven’t read this book thoroughly myself, I don’t really understand Japanese that much and my mother is a bad translator. But I can say this book basically tells about basic knowledge and brief history on calligraphy and lettering. It covers alphabets, hiragana, katakana and kanji. The book has 332 pages and was first published on Nov 1, 1975 to mark the 50 years he had spent on his career. Of course there were no computers in his time, as you can see in the pictures below he shared some of his techniques on how to move the pen or brush to create delicate lines for the letters. I’m always amazed by strong craftsmanship people had back then.

Anyway, I’m thinking to try to digitize some of the font type he designed that are shown in this book. I’m curious on how it’s going to look like. I’ll let you know when that happens.