Morisawa, one of Japan's leading font foundry, has launched a new cloud-based subscription service called Morisawa Fonts. They wanted to create a campaign that can raise awareness of this new service that not only targets designers and typography fans, but to new younger audiences that may have never heard or thought of choosing "fonts."

Our idea was to collaborate with a renowned musician, and create a music video where we visualize the lyrics using the rich variety of fonts you can find on Morisawa Fonts.

In order to reach new fans, we wanted to collaborate with a young musician with a huge following so that we can appeal to a wider audience. After some research, we found Vaundy, the best candidate for this collaboration. He's one of the top solo male singer in Japan with more than 2.8 billion total views on his YouTube channel, who is also still a young design school student himself, which is exactly the type of new users that Morisawa Fonts wanted to acquire. When we proposed the concept to him, he gladly accepted the offer and composed the new song "Okitegami" for this project.

We didn't want the video to become just another "lyric video." We wanted the fonts to become the main actors of the video, so we used various elaborate techniques to bring each fonts to life. Letters were cut out and moved by hand under the black-light to create a "hand-made-kinetic-typography" sequence, which would be difficult to create using only digital animation tools. Other analog methods of animations such as flip-books and rotoscope were also used, to add materiality to each of the letters and to emphasize its unique forms. We ended up using/showcasing 77 different fonts that best matches each word of the lyric, which is all credited at the end of the video.

Views: Over 6 million views on YouTube

*As of 1/17/2023

After the launch, access to the service page from organic search and social media increased, creating an opportunity for target users who had not yet heard of or used Morisawa to learn about Morisawa Fonts. It also contributed to an increase in sales.

After the release, 158 media covered the story. Not only did Morisawa gain a lot of exposure through articles in a wide range of media, from entertainment to news apps, but the project has also become one of Morisawa's most high-profile projects in recent years.