Photo by kennymatic

When I was an undergrad I did a lot of neat visual projects in Japanese class and our Japan club had to make flyers for all our events. The problem we usually had? Where were all the fun Japanese fonts? Usually we made do with Adobe Photoshop and some adjustments to text directly, but we always wished there had been more available on the internet for making shnazzy text. So today we’re going to introduce you to a few places that have links to various fancy, fun, and free fonts for Japanese text. The midterm time crunch means we won’t go into detail, but hey, the pictures of each sample on the sites are pretty self explanatory!

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NihongoUp has a list of 10 great fonts (some free and some not) in their article here:
http://nihongoup.com/blog/10-beautiful-japanese-fonts/

Wazu Japan has close to 60 unicode fonts on two gallery pages:
http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Japanese.html

CoolText has about 35 up for download:
http://cooltext.com/Fonts-Unicode-Japanese

Design Soh Tanaka also has a set of ten with some pretty neat pics to show the fonts at work:
http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/6-japanese-typography-websites-free-downloads/

This site appears to have English instructions to downloading fonts off of Japanese pages:
http://www.geocities.jp/ep3797/japanese_fonts.html

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Please note that we haven’t tried all of these out ourselves, so if the sites have any broken links we apologize. Let us know if that’s the case and we’ll make note of it here on the site. Happy typing and have a great weekend!