Akira Kobayashi was born on July 4, 1960 in Nigata, Japan. He studied at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo from 1979 to 1983 to pursue a career as a designer. He found that there is a type designer among other designers in the University. He was immediately drawn to type that could serve a very specific social function. His first work as a type design was at Sha-ken Co.,Ltd where he designed font Hiragino Nicho and Hiragino Roman.
One day, Kobayashi felt exhausted due to the requirement of drawing about 20 Kanji characters a day. He picked a small book, About Alphabets by Herman Zapf. He became curious about about Latin alphabet and soon enough he left Japan for the first time to London where he took calligraphy course at London College of Printing.
"From about 1985 to 1994 I learned a kind of Japanese calligraphy called “Yose-moji”, or “Comedy-house letter”. It is not an artistic calligraphy that most people know but actually a kind of signwriting with a very fat brush. From Yose-moji I leaned to focus on the balance between black and white, which is one of the key factors to understanding Western typography."
Kobayashi has been working as a Type Director at Monotype GmbH since May 2001.