A couple of days after having written about Faux-typefaces in Hebrew, I came across this ad on a Ramat-Aviv billboard:

Even without reading Hebrew it should be clear that something is wrong here: The Devanagari ॐ (Aum) doesn't really goes well with the Japanese-style Hebrew.

In fact, it's a complete misuse of the Japanese-like font. The ad is for a Hatha Vinyasa Yoga school. If anything, something Indian should have been used. But the Japanese-style font is probably readily available for home-made publishing (a link, anybody?), and, well, it's from Asia, too, isn't it?

Which brings me to another interesting point. For faux-typefaces to be effective, their audience should have a reasonable acquittance with the foreign script. So while Tibetan-style Chinese seems to be frequent (in China), I can't imagine someone trying to typeface Tibetan-style Hebrew (not that it would be to useful, seeing that unfortunately there is no Tibetan food in Israel... Oh, I do love Momo). The Yoga school, even if they had put more effort into font design, couldn't really go for an Indian look, as I don't think Devanagari would be widely recognized here, not even by Yoga fans.

There's another condition, I think, for using faux-scripts. While people should recognize it, they shouldn't actually be able to read it (Bill Poser said something in that respect). Because, well, if people can read it, you can actually use the foreign script instead of simulating it. This is probably why faux-Latin is so rare, not just here but also elsewhere. (An example I could come up with is: The Diet Coke logo, where the Teth is heavily based on a Latin D. But I think it's more about evoking the original (English) Diet Coca Cola logo, rather than Latin script in general).