The award-winning Conrad was created by Japanese type designer Akira Kobayashi. Its design was based on the fifteenth-century type by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, two German printers active in Rome at that time. They produced a unique, slightly unbalanced yet attractive type. Kobayashi says of his typeface, "I have designed a couple of typefaces inspired from the past, but this time the original print acted merely as a reference. The distinctive lowercase 'a' and some other letters were inspired by Sweynheym and Pannartz's second roman type, but I revived the type in a more informal way. Here I used the historical type as a springboard. The resulting type looks different, taking on a rather temporary and lively look. I assume that the Conrad is the first revival of the Sweynheym and Pannartz type, though it does not closely resemble the original." Conrad won first prize for the text typeface category in Linotype's Third International Typeface Design Contest (2000) as well as the Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors Club (2001).
Since 2001, Akira Kobayashi has been working as the Type Director at Linotype.
