May 2007 Archives

Miguel Sousa, David Lemon and I attended Linotype's "TypoTechnica" conference recently. Here are our presentations, followed by a review of the conference and some talks.

Facelift presentation (150K PDF). My talk on why we're revising the entire Adobe Type Library, and what kinds of technical tweaks we're making.

Font naming presentation (2 MB PDF). This talk explains a lot about font names and style links in OpenType fonts. It seems I do this every year or two. I realized in giving this talk that I needed to update some of the slides with newer FontLab screen shots, so I did that, and it's the updated slides that I am posting.

Glyph naming presentation (100K PDF). Another perennial favorite, which I covered in the same session as font naming.

Font Production at Adobe (150K PDF). Miguel Sousa gave this first in-depth look at the current Adobe OpenType font production process.

Font testing at Adobe (2.3 MB PDF). Miguel looks at the range of tools and procedures needed to test OpenType fonts.

QE Outputs (250K PDF). Samples of output from testing tools, goes with Miguel's Font Testing talk.

Every couple of years in June there's this cool typography conference in Thessaloniki, Greece. Well, maybe more tropically warm, but you get the idea. This year, besides the conference and other events June 18-24, there's a Greek type design contest. Luckily, you don't even have to do a full typeface, just these words: ένα αναμφισβήτητα ξεχωριστό γεγονός.

The contest has a bunch of categories (text, display, pixel, experiemental) and you're free to do anything from a traditional font to photography, video, animation or CGI. The deadline is May 31st, and there are valuable prizes. Details here (note the links at the top for all the different sections). Thanks to Eirini Vlachou for the tip!

In related news, the Type Directors Club in NYC is holding the second in a series of "Non-Latin Weekend" type design seminars, Oct 5-7. This time it's Gerry Leonidas, on Greek type design. This is the same guy who consults for companies such as Adobe and Microsoft to help us get our Greek typefaces looking good. I'm hoping we can send two or three people, because this is sure to be worthwhile for anybody who would like to design Greek typefaces (or typefaces that include Greek, as most of ours do these days).