What makes Japanese letterforms so irresistible to designers?

Welcome back to DESK! As promised last week, I continue to use this newsletter to share more thoughts straight from mymind.

Thinking a lot about the future of writing lately, I’ve come to a new conclusion.

For the past years I've tried to get better at my writing. Stylistically as well as conceptually. To get sharper, cleaner and more deliberate.

But now with AI it feels like everyone can write well. "Good" writing has become the new baseline. You know the kind of polished, edited and flawless writing that took hours of revisions is suddenly everywhere. And because of that, it’s lost its soul. Only few people (trained mostly) used that kind of perfect punctuation before, let alone the — dash which became another giveaway of AI writing (god damnit, I loved the em dash, but I got a new one, its 〰️).

So I decided to do the opposite. To just write.

Write from the gut, from the mind, from the moment.

There will be mistakes for sure. I will stumble, stylistic inconsistencies 〰️ who knows. But you'll always know it's from me.

In a way, it's the closest you'll get to me. Because I write this for myself more so than for anyone else. I write it more as a diary to myself, and less to be read. This changes the dynamic entirely.

I like this, and I hope you do too.

The mystic pull of Japanese letterforms

Last night I thought about the beauty of Japanese letter forms and why designers around the world feel attracted to them.

In particular Western designers, who can't even read or understand the symbols. It has always been a bit of a mystery to me, even with my own obsession. Am I just a victim of the classic designer's cliche?

It's easy to dismiss it as aesthetic fetishism or just the mystic allure connected to Japanese pop culture. But there has to be more to it.

After thinking about it further I believe there's a deeper hidden psychological reason why we as designers are so in love with them.

Japanese letterforms basically embody what most designers spend their lives chasing 〰️ A form carrying meaning without depending on literal comprehension (like a good logomark basically).

It's basically visual language at its purest.

Each mark has its own weight, rhythm and balance. As if each letter is a logo on its own, carrying its own meaning. And funny enough, that's pretty much what it is.

Its sculpture as writing, almost primal in a way (also let's not forget, the history of it is much closer to analog brushstrokes than our modern western typography, which has been sanitized over the last decades).

Compared to our (let's call it boring) western phonetic alphabet where letters seem more arbitrary and modular, Japanese calligraphy looks more like real intent.

Japanese characters sort of live in a space, compared to our Western letters which exist mostly in a straight line, like the way you see it here. The moment we remove them from their prison, things get complicated quickly (graphic designers know this is an art in itself).

On top of it, Japanese visual culture is based on negative space, imperfection and restraint. Basically everything we value and crave as designers. Even with our language barrier, we can see and appreciate the raw composition. For people who care about form, it's weirdly irresistible.

So perhaps our obsession with it just boils down to envy.

We designers see these forms and wish our own work could be like it.

Meaning distilled into beauty, and beauty inseparable from meaning.

Let's keep trying,