Stereotypography

NBC’s Tokyo Olympics identity is stereotypical?

American broadcaster NBC has updated its identity for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics Games, after the decision to postpone it to 2021.

Asides the main part of this new identity —202ONE—, I would like to think about the typography for “TOKYO”.

The original Tokyo 2020 identity for NBC (Image credit: Mocean)

Japan=brush calligraphy

Photo by Marco Zuppone on Unsplash

It is true that we, Japanese, have traditional calligraphy —shodō(書道)—, that we use a brush (fude 筆) and an inkstick (sumi 墨). However, it’s only for Japanese character —kanji, hiragana, and katakana— obviously, but not for Latin alphabet.

Of course, it’s not forbidden and we can see this approach even in Japan, today. But I was just thinking that it is too easy to do that, but maybe, since I’m Japanese.