The afternoon light in Kyoto, and what it taught us about typography.
The first thing you notice walking from Kyoto Station toward Gion in late October is the angle of the light. It hits the wooden screens at maybe twenty degrees off horizontal. Every surface becomes a horizontal stripe.
We had been struggling with line-height in our long-form reading mode for months. Two days in this city and the answer was obvious: the lines themselves had to feel like horizontal light.
Counter-spaces.
A type designer in our travelling group, Hiro, pointed out that the gaps between objects here are designed as carefully as the objects themselves. The space between two stones in a garden has a name.
We came home and renamed half our spacing tokens.
Material as scale.
Wood, paper, lacquer, stone — every material announces a different reading distance. You read paper close. You read stone from across a courtyard.
Our type ramp now has materials as mnemonics. Stone-1, Stone-2, Paper-1. Half a joke and half a useful thing.
Marisol Vega
Photographer-in-residence at The Margins. She lives in Lisbon and shoots on a Mamiya 7 most days. This was issue 14 of her ongoing series on the periphery of design.