AXIS Font: Type Project’s Bilingual Magazine and Compact Widths

Type Project developed AXIS Font for a bilingual design magazine. Its original family account explains the aim of setting a whole magazine with one coherent family, including compatible Japanese and Latin forms. This guide concerns that named product; a variable-font axis is a different technical concept, and other publishers also sell unrelated fonts called Axis. For an editorial brief, record Type Project and the chosen AXIS edition before building a style sheet. List Japanese headings, Latin titles, captions and body text separately so each role can be evaluated in the same spread.

The Compact Series gives kanji, kana and Latin characters their own appropriate widths. Type Project specifies Condensed kanji at 80% and kana at 76% of normal width, and Compressed kanji at 60% and kana at 50%. These are construction choices, not a recipe to horizontally scale every character by one percentage. Duplicate a short Japanese–Latin caption into equal-width frames and compare the actual Basic, Condensed and Compressed resources. Keep wording and point size fixed initially. Examine mixed-script rhythm and punctuation near the line ending before using the extra capacity to add more information.

Type Project’s attributed interview about AXIS issue 230 documents a specific problem after the magazine format became smaller: Light looked too thin at the revised text size, while Regular looked somewhat heavy. The resulting custom text weight, AXIS FF ProN T, sat between them. Treat that as a project-specific commission, not a promise that every retail package includes the same resource. Make a full-size printout of your own reduced spread before deciding whether to change size, width or weight. The homepage character-style experiments substitute Unicode text; they neither reproduce AXIS outlines nor create an intermediate font weight.