Accidental typeface inspired by a toy from the ’90s, namely tamagotchi, a digital animal and the aesthetics of the Japanese maho-shojo franchises. The font combines the pixel graphics and the strokes of a broad-nib pen. Predominantly used in large print (from 400px). Tanagotchi font has quite accentuated outline elements, which makes the set heapy, so additional alternate characters less prominent were made to “smooth” the set. The set includes Latin and Cyrillic lowercase and uppercase, numbers and punctuation marks. Also to support the concept of Japanese aesthetics, special glyphs and aeroglyphs. The Tanagotchi typeface has quite accentuated outline elements, which makes the set look hefty, so additional alternate characters were made to “smooth out” the set in a less prominent way

I decided to show the font on the example of the International Japanese Film Festival, making an identity for it based on the accent font “tamagotchi typeface”. It seemed to me that this theme fit well with the concept of the font, because it was inspired by Japanese aesthetics. The font is mostly used in large print, so we chose media where tamagotchi typeface can be used on a large scale: billboards, posters, media platforms, and souvenir products (t-shirts, caps, shopper).

The font set includes lowercase and uppercase Latin, lowercase and uppercase Cyrillic, numbers, punctuation marks and also special characters – Japanese hieroglyphics – were developed to support the Japanese theme and could be further used in applications.

This project was carried out as a student project at the HSE School of Art and Design in 2023, curated by Elizaveta Kopay-Gora.