Conceal

I released Conceal on October 11, 2007. The idea came to me while shopping with my fiancée at Matsuzakaya in Nagoya. I noticed how many cosmetics brands relied on humanist sans-serifs, often in the style of Optima. That led me to imagine a display face that could echo the elegance of those typefaces but with a surface texture that suggested lipstick strokes.

Conceal was designed in uppercase only. At first, it looked more like a standard rounded sans serif with a flattened, slanted nib, but I added small indents where the strokes met. Instead of overlapping, they “kissed,” just barely touching at the corners. This detail was what gave the font its name and linked it back to the idea of cosmetics, specifically concealer. The joins were drawn manually, not as modular components, so each junction was adjusted by hand to achieve the intended effect.

On June 25, 2021, I updated it by removing deprecated characters such as L with dot and E with breve, expanding the OpenType fractions feature to support longer strings, and refining the vertical metrics to improve cross-browser compatibility. The update didn’t change its appearance in most applications but ensured it behaved more predictably in web environments.

I haven’t seen Conceal used in cosmetics or fashion branding, which was the area that inspired it, but it remains in my catalog as a reflection of that period and the idea of merging typographic form with surface suggestion.