Kiwi Maru
Designed By
Hiroki-Chan
3 Styles Serif
The pleasure
of a well-set
page.
Kiwi Maru · Regular
Compare this serif family in headings and a continuous reading sample.
3 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Kiwi Maru ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
See you at the station later
A Page In Kiwi Maru
Kiwi Maru · Regular
Headings, labels and running text.
Notes From The Reading Room
The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.
A heading marks the next chapter. The margins leave room for a note while the text continues across the page.
3 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Light300
Preview Light · 2.4 MB
See you at the station later
Regular400
See you at the station later
Medium500
Preview Medium · 2.5 MB
See you at the station later
The weights of Kiwi Maru sit very close together, Light at 300 to Medium at 500, and Hiroki-Chan did that on purpose. Operating systems and browsers each render the same weight a little differently, so the idea is to pick whichever looks right on the device in front of you.
The bigger argument behind the font is about tone. Japanese, the designer explains, sorts its basic vocabulary into 3 kinds, and the font is aimed at the 2 casual ones, everyday words and slang, which by 2020 were being shown on phones, tablets and PCs almost entirely in Mincho or Gothic. A round face, in this view, gives back some of the feeling those 2 styles press flat. There is also a complaint in the notes about fonts carrying painfully many kanji, an unusual thing for a type designer to say out loud.
The designer hopes people will try it, experimentally, in papers and reports. We would take that up for a class handout or an internal report, and keep it away from anything legal.
The file is large, 8,318 characters with kana and kanji plus Latin and Cyrillic, and the OpenType list includes fractions, ordinals, superscripts and a slashed zero. Set beside Western text, its Latin runs wide.
Characters & Figures
8,318 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Kiwi Maru
3 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 7.4 MB ↓- Version
- 1.100
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/kiwi-maru-3/kiwi-maru-3.css">
body {
font-family: 'Kiwi Maru', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Kiwi Maru Heading · Inter Body
Notes From The Reading Room
The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.