Murecho

Mure-cho no longer exists. The town in Kagawa Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku, was merged into the city of Takamatsu in 2006, and Neil Summerour named this typeface after it so the name would carry on.

He had lived there as a teenage exchange student. Summerour moved to the United States from the Azores as a small child, and he has said Mure was the first place that felt like a hometown. Years later, as a lettering artist, calligrapher and the founder of Positype, an independent foundry he has run since 2000 from a home studio in suburban Georgia, he won the People’s Choice Award at the 2012 Morisawa Type Design Competition. Murecho is his Japanese text face.

It is a gothic, which is what Japanese calls a sans serif, with low stroke contrast and flat terminals, drawn for setting text in Japan. The character set covers hiragana, katakana and the Joyo kanji with some beyond, and Latin, Greek and Cyrillic sit alongside.

9 weights, Thin to Black. For running Japanese text we’d go with Regular or Light; the Black is for a sign or a cover.