About

I am Acia (a-sha, a-sih-ay, a-sigh-ah), the founder of Arx Aciae. The name began with my surname, Kawasaki: kawa (川) means “river”, and saki (﨑) means “top” or “cape”. In Latin, arx can mean “fortress”, “castle”, or a high place, while Aciae means “of Acia”. Arx Aciae is therefore a small fortress of my work: a place where typefaces, invented scripts, and its documentation are stored.

Inside this fortress are Arcae, Arcana, and Archivum. Arcae (chests) holds the typefaces I design. Arcana (secrets) presents writing systems and tools that need more than a specimen page. Archivum documents the process behind the work: how letters are researched, drawn, tested, revised, and eventually made usable.

My path into type design began with languages and writing systems. I studied linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, but gradually realized that my interest was less in academic writing than in making visible systems. I have always been drawn to art, structure, and the shape of language. When I began developing Werberry, a writing system for sign languages, I started learning how to build a typeface for it in Glyphs. That practical experiment became the beginning of a broader love for designing typefaces across scripts.