Lutes UD

Lutes UD is a part of Morisawa’s UD (Universal Design) range. Typefaces with the label UD are designed to work well in a variety of circumstances, from print to screen, in text and large sizes. They are conceived as multifunctional tools in the service of readability and user-centric design. 

In a collaborative effort to internationalize the UD project, Morisawa engaged Rosetta to create original Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, and Latin complements to their Japanese typeface Reimin. To meet the challenge, Rosetta assembled a small group of designers under the direction of our long-term collaborator Titus Nemeth. As the design lead he contributed the Arabic and Latin scripts, the latter with help from Anna Štepanovská. Octavio Pardo was commissioned to design the Cyrillic, with expert advice from Maria Doreuli; Florian Runge designed the Devanagari with consultation from Fiona Ross; and Irene Vlachou designed the Greek. 

In Japanese typefaces from the UD collection, Morisawa pays particular attention to typographic contrast and the gradation of thin strokes throughout the family’s weight range. In order to meet this design characteristic, we created a dedicated multi-axis variable font, fine-tuning colour and contrast of the newly added scripts.

The resulting families Lutes UD Pan-European (PE), Lutes UD Arabic, and Lutes UD Devanagari offer dramatically expanded language support, including Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Russian, Urdu, and Vietnamese. In the Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts, matching italics round off the typographic palette. In conjunction with Morisawa’s original Japanese design, a stylistically consistent and polyphonic type system is now on offer to facilitate multilingual and cross-cultural communication.