Petanko
Petanko (ぺたんこ) is a rounded and slightly squashed looking free Japanese font that feels vertically compressed. It was modified from an open-sourced font Zen Maru Gothic by stretching it wider, and adding more roundedness and ever so slightly randomness of handwriting style. The result it’s a cute and fun looking font suitable for headlines and callouts for cute designs. Petanko in Japanese means flattened, a perfect name for this font.
Petanko comes with three font weights: Regular (as shown on the preview image above), Medium and Bold. It has all the basic Japanese characters as you would expect with kanji supports up to JIS Level 2, or Adobe-Japan 1-3. Since this is a modification from an open-sourced font, Petanko is released as a free font with the SIL Open Font License, same as Zen Maru Gothic. This means you can use it freely for personal and commercial projects.
Usage Permission
- Free for personal and commercial projects
- Released under SIL Open Font License, v1.1
Link
To download, visit the page above and look for the button highlighted in the screenshot below. Click on the blue button that says “Free Download” to start the download. Bear in mind that you will need to have a Pixiv account in order to download, which is rather easy to create. Once installed, in Photoshop you will be able to select this font under the name “Petanko”.
Supported characters
- Hiragana and Katakana
- Kanji (Up to JIS Level 2)
- Alphanumerics
- Latin characters
- Symbols and Punctuations