The Japan Times
Front page of the first issue to feature the new design, from April 1, 2017. Berlingske Slab is used for the three teasers at the top right, among other places.
The Japan Times is Japan’s largest and oldest English-language daily newspaper. Featuring a mixture of news, opinion and culture it is typeset in the Berlingske family.
In 2017, on the occasion of the 120th anniversary, The Japan Times launched their first major redesign in 30 years, introducing a new logo in all-lowercase letters, and a new set of typefaces. Art director Andrew Lee commented on the redesign in two articles. From “New-look print issue rings in the next era”:
The text font has […] changed from Utopia to the beautiful Berlingske Serif Text Light and we have used several other weights of Berlingske Serif Text for headlines and elsewhere throughout the paper. This typeface was originally designed for use in the Danish national newspaper, Berlingske, by the Copenhagen-based font foundry Playtype, who describe it as a “distinctly newspaper typography” that’s “eminently readable and strikingly easy to navigate in.”
We were fortunate to find a font that had already been so rigorously tested in a newspaper environment. It was a perfect match for us at The Japan Times. The sans and slab styles [see below], too, work well as secondary fonts for sidebars, subheads and so on.
The Serif Black style is also used in our new logo and in the new page labels, which really pull the whole look of the redesign together.
In “Creating the perfect blend of our past and present”, Lee further notes:
The serif styles of the Berlingske family have a particularly nice calligraphic feel to them, which we felt evoked the brush strokes of Japanese script — this is especially true for the Serif Black style. In the “jt” icon to the right, notice how the arc of the stem in the descender of the lowercase “j” comes to a point, as if an inked brush was lifting from the page. This classic feel to the letters also manages to prevent the lowercase “the japan times” from becoming too light-hearted.
![Andrew Lee on the abbreviated logo and the advantages of lowercase letters:
We realized early on that, true to responsive web design methods, we needed to work backward from the smallest version of the logo we would need. In today’s digital world that often means the icons used on social media — in our case we simply use the abbreviation “JT.” […]
We realized that the capital letters “J” and “T” are, in general, pretty horrible together.
When shrunk down to the small sizes needed for reading on mobile devices, “JT” had a tendency to look like the symbol for pi (Π). The awkward white space above the descending hook of the “J” also made things difficult. Another problem was the association in Japan with the “JT” logo of Japan Tobacco.
The lower case “j” and “t,” however, looked like a much more promising option.](https://assets.fontsinuse.com/static/use-media-items/167/166991/full-4500x8000/62cedbc3/japan-times_ig-story_1080x1920px_.png)
Andrew Lee on the abbreviated logo and the advantages of lowercase letters:
We realized early on that, true to responsive web design methods, we needed to work backward from the smallest version of the logo we would need. In today’s digital world that often means the icons used on social media — in our case we simply use the abbreviation “JT.” […]
We realized that the capital letters “J” and “T” are, in general, pretty horrible together.
When shrunk down to the small sizes needed for reading on mobile devices, “JT” had a tendency to look like the symbol for pi (Π). The awkward white space above the descending hook of the “J” also made things difficult. Another problem was the association in Japan with the “JT” logo of Japan Tobacco.
The lower case “j” and “t,” however, looked like a much more promising option.
The new logo in Berlingske Serif Black (here paired with the address in ITC Avant Garde Gothic)
Notebook with embossed cover
1 Comment on “The Japan Times”
I enjoy foundries like Playtype and The Lazydogs Typefoundry. They show us that the monotype oligopoly is becoming less and less important. And that’s just as well!