Typblography

As discussed in our March 28, 2013 article, Adobe Blank was recently released as a open source special-purpose OpenType font that helps to solve the FOUT (Flash Of Unstyled Text) problem.

The version that was initially released was approximately 80K in size, and included 257 glyphs, 256 of which were functional in the sense that they are mapped from 1,111,998 Unicode code points, though they are intentionally non-spacing and non-marking. I further analyzed the tables, and found a way to trim the size further by increasing the number of glyphs to 2,049, 2,048 of which are functional. The size is now a more modest 32K.
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The Adobe Type team is often asked for more details on how we go about designing typefaces; what sort of historical elements went into the design, was there a specific approach that we took, and what problems we were trying to solve. Very often, a combination of factors like historical precedent, language coverage, stylistic trends and media target (print, web, UI, app, etc.) can be interesting to our customers.

With the typophile in mind, and others who are interested in font design, we produced our latest set of type specimens. These specimens, now available as PDFs on www.adobe.com/type, delve into the design of four recent Adobe Original typefaces – Trajan Sans, Trajan Pro 3, Myriad Arabic and Myriad Hebrew. We hope you enjoy reading this material and learning more about these typefaces.

Earlier this year, the Adobe Type Team was approached by one of our other development teams to produce a special-purpose font with two fascinating—at least to me—characteristics:

• All Unicode code points are covered.
• All code points are rendered using a non-spacing and non-marking glyph.

I decided to take on this task, because I immediately recognized that the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS was the appropriate vehicle for developing such a font.

The font itself was developed early this year, and I finally got around to releasing it on Open@Adobe as a new open-source project named Adobe Blank OpenType Font. I will soon mirror it on GitHub for those who prefer to get their open-source material from there.
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A few weeks back my co-worker Miguel Sousa blogged about the fundraising adventure our team embarked on to help raise money for the Hamilton Wood Type Museum. Now that we have all of the donations tallied and matching requests submitted, I am happy to announce that our crazy idea of selling cupcakes in-a-jar for Valentine’s Day raised $7,500 for the Hamilton Museum. As lovers of type, and supporters of the Hamilton Museum, we couldn’t be happier with how this fundraiser turned out. Continue reading…

A little over three months ago, we launched the Adobe Type Community Translation program and began engaging with community members to translate the typeface notes for the Adobe Type Library. Using the Adobe Translation Center (ATC), customers, users and fans of Adobe Type have contributed over 260 translations to this project. We’d like to take a moment to publicly thank all of these individuals for their contributions. Continue reading…

Since the launch of Source Sans Pro just over two months ago, it has been encouraging to us to see its adoption in places such as the text font on the popular social news site, Digg, and incorporated as part of Stanford University’s identity guidelines for digital media. Part of the reason that we care about adoption is that we hope that as others want to use these fonts, they will also help to develop this type family to cover an expanding range of use cases.

Logos Bible Software 5 interface featuring Source Sans Pro

In fact, we recently had our first collaborative experience to extend the functionality of Source Sans. Not long after the fonts’ release, Logos Bible Software contacted us with a list of features which they indicated interest in helping to develop. Today Logos is launching the latest version of their bible study application and they have switched to using Source Sans as the main type for the user interface. In speaking about why Logos decided to make this change to their UI design, Bob Pritchet, CEO of Logos Bible Software, remarks, “Source Sans is a beautiful and uniquely useful type family with multiple weights, a rich set of glyphs, strong OpenType feature support, and most importantly, an open source license that allows us to extend it for specific needs, like scholarly text-critical apparatuses and ancient scripts.”
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We are pleased to announce that all of Adobe’s Web Fonts are available through Monotype’s Web Fonts service at Fonts.com.

Adobe and Monotype have been working together for over two decades to deliver the highest quality fonts for desktop and printer use to our customers.  The inclusion of Adobe Web Fonts on Fonts.com is a natural direction for us to take in continuing this long-lasting relationship and demonstrates our combined desire to bring fine typography to the web. In the future Adobe will make selected Monotype fonts available on our Typekit web font service.  Watch this blog for more details soon.

To browse the selection of Adobe Web Fonts on Fonts.com go to the Adobe foundry page by clicking the ‘WEB FONTS’ tab. You’ll find over 300 hundred fonts from Adobe’s award winning type library. Each of these fonts has been hand-tuned to look great on screens and in today’s web browsers.

We welcome Fonts.com as another Adobe Web Fonts partner and look forward to seeing more Adobe Web Fonts on the web.

To learn more about Adobe Web Fonts, visit our Adobe Web Fonts page.

To learn more about Typekit by Adobe, visit typekit.com.

To learn more about the Fonts.com Web Fonts service, visit fonts.com.

Earlier this year, Adobe sponsored a series of short videos by the Type Directors Club (TDC). Each video in the series, appropriately named Type Legends, features an interview with a legendary type designer. Thus far, four videos have been released. As a sponsor of the videos, supporter of TDC, and a team of folks passionate about type we were thrilled to see these videos come to life and wanted to share the video links with all our Typblography followers.

Enjoy!

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Following up on Source Sans

The public reception of the release of Source Sans Pro last month was very encouraging. My colleague, Ken Lunde, pointed out that this was not Adobe’s first open source font as Kenten Generic has been available for some time now. But I stand by my claim that it is Adobe’s first open source type family. Sorry, Ken. The blog post announcing the family’s release has been our most popular in the history of Typblography and the news was picked up by major tech media outlets such as Wired, Ars Technica, The Verge, &c. As of today, the fonts have been downloaded over 68,250 times from SourceForge.

One particularly surprising aspect of Source Sans’s release was the amount of interest generated by the teaser graphic of the monospaced version. It seemed that this generated about as much buzz as the fonts that we released. Brackets, the open source code editor created by Adobe, has just recently implemented the regular weight of Source Code into their project. Likewise, the font will be integrated into Adobe Edge Code, which was announced this morning at our Create the Web event in San Francisco. The complete family of six weights will also be available as part of our new Adobe Edge Web Fonts service, which was just announced this morning.

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Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of a new pilot program – Adobe Type Community Translation. This program is aimed at getting translations for Adobe’s typeface notes and will offer handsome rewards for contributors. We will be leveraging Adobe’s own community translation tool, the Adobe Translator application, to get translations for our 400+ typeface notes (also referred to as typeface histories). These typeface notes provide users additional information about the typeface and often include information about the history of the typeface. On average, these typeface notes are about 100 words in length. Continue reading…