Toshi Omagari, Type Designer and Video Game Font Historian

Toshi Omagari studied Visual Communication Design at Musashino Art University, Japan, and then got his master's in Typeface Design at the University of Reading in England. From 2012 to 2020, he worked at Monotype, one of the leading digital type foundries, with roots that date back well over a century. During that time, he created his own faces and revivals, including a major reworking and expansion of five typefaces created by Berthold Wolpe. Toshi runs his own font studio now, and lectures and teaches.
His 2019 book, Arcade Game Typography (find it at a bookstore), is an incredible deep dive into the 8-by-8 pixel fonts used in early video game systems and arcade consoles. Just a few days before we spoke, he posted a blog entry about ink traps and light traps, which has the kind of obsessive detail that appeals to someone like me, the author of a 6,000-word monograph on flongs and stereotypes.
Subscribe to the podcast feed directly via this link, via iTunes, or any podcasting app.




Show Notes
- Arcade Game Typography
- Wolpe collection
- Ink traps and light traps
- Akita Kobiyashi
- IDEA magazine
- GeoGuessr
- Toshi’s Centaur revival mentioned in Print magazine
- The Python scripting language has become the standard for scripting in type design programs to produce sophisticated OpenType elements embedded in a font file
- Cowhand
- Nadine Chahine
- Guido van Rossum developed Python; his brother, Just van Rossum, is a well-known type designer and experimenter
- The late Sue Shaw, founder of the Type Archive
- London Kerning
- Sachsenwald matrices at the Bixler Letterfoundry