ITC Japanese Garden Ornaments is a symbol font designed by Akira Kobayashi (before Kobayashi became Linotype's Type Director in 2001, he worked as an independent typeface designer in Tokyo). The images in Japanese Garden are, as the name suggests, mostly floral or herbaceous, derived from designs used in Japanese indigo stencil dyeing. "In Japanese Garden," Kobayashi says, "I tried to create a set of type fleurons that are very familiar to a Japanese eye, but not too exotic to people in other countries." Several of the designs fit together seamlessly in repeating patterns; others work either together or as isolated ornaments, a flexibility that also characterizes traditional Western type fleurons.
"The original illustrations," notes Kobayashi, "were mostly cut from white paper squares, about two by two inches in size, and were simply scanned and traced. That is why there are few smooth curves and perfectly straight lines in the illustrations. I simply liked the ragged textures of them."
