Typblography

We’re happy to announce that earlier today, Typekit released 16 additional fonts of Garamond Premier Pro (Text and Caption). As you might recall from Christopher Slye’s post back in September, we went out and asked customers what fonts they wanted for the web. We heard some great feedback and thank everyone who chimed in.

Based on what we heard, we decided on a two-pronged approach for additional releases — to offer new families with just a few fonts and to extend certain families to include more weights. Our next web font release will include some new families for you to play with, but our first priority was to extend the offering for Garamond Premier Pro to include two more optical size ranges, Text (Regular) and Caption, for a total of 16 additional fonts. Our initial release included only the ten Display size fonts.

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Update: We’re excited to have hired not one but two new MA graduates, who’ll be starting at Adobe in January. Watch for a post introducing them later. I want to thank all the people who inquired about the position; it was an impressive group!

- David L

To help keep things fresh, Adobe Systems has a program dedicated to bringing in people just out of college. As part of this program, we now have the opportunity to add someone in the Type team. If you’ve just received your Masters degree or are in your final year, you might be the person we’re looking for. Continue reading…

One benefit of web fonts that many designers may not immediately think of is the potential to serve fonts for languages that website visitors may not have font support for on their local devices. In case you may have missed this information in earlier communications, the web fonts we are serving on Typekit are full analogues of desktop fonts. This means that the web versions of all our fonts have all the same glyphs and all of the OpenType features found in their counterparts. Although there is currently no mechanism for exploring language support on Typekit, I have been assured that this will be forthcoming. In the meantime, I thought it would be worthwhile to review the language support provided by our current set of web fonts.
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Adobe has put a lot of effort into developing and supporting the OpenType font format, so we’re pleased that in the last ten years or so, type users have embraced it and enjoyed the layout features it offers. Getting accustomed to the typographic richness that OpenType provides means, though, that one misses it when it’s not available. That’s the problem we have right now with fonts on the web.

OpenType text layout requires an application or client to support a particular feature — substitutions like stylistic alternates and small caps, for example — before it can be seen or used. Most browsers don’t do this today. Your browser might receive a feature-laden OpenType font and use it to render the text you’re looking at, but it will ignore most or all of its OpenType features. (There is currently limited support for default ligatures, alternates and kerning in the current versions of Firefox and Safari, but it is far from the comprehensive support that web designers would like.)

Thankfully that’s about to change due to the growing popularity of web fonts and ongoing work on the next major revision for fonts in CSS, the “CSS Fonts Module Level 3,” usually just called “CSS3 Fonts.” (See the latest Editor’s Draft for all the details. Currently, OpenType layout is covered in the section Font Feature Properties.)

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If you had to pick twenty or thirty fonts to take with you to a desert island, what would they be? Does that sound like a lot? You probably want a few different typefaces, and various weights and widths. You’ll need some italics to go with them, and you might already be accustomed to having at least a couple optical sizes to choose from. Still think it’s easy? Consider this: The complete family of Kepler Std fonts in the Adobe Type Library contains 192 different fonts.

When we selected the first sixteen families for the debut release of Adobe Web Fonts, we used our own judgement and some internal data to choose an assortment of fonts (121 altogether) that we thought would offer excellent typographic options for our customers and satisfy a few well-known user requests (e.g. Myriad). With that first release behind us, we can now consider our next web font release — but preparing those fonts for the web takes time and resources, so there’s only so much we can tackle this time. This is our current challenge: to make a relatively small selection of fonts that will be satisfying and useful for our customers.

We have our own ideas, but we want to hear from you. We’ve already had a number of requests, but just about everyone has an opinion when it comes to type. Maybe you do too.

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We’ve made some changes to the typography here at Typblography. Adobe’s blogging system was recently converted to use WordPress, and with it came an Adobe-wide template that we (and others) noticed had some typographic shortcomings. Particularly problematic was text size — and line length along with it. Now that the dust has settled on our WordPress upgrade, we were able to adjust a few of these things. We’re also pleased to now be using Adobe’s corporate font, Adobe Clean, served for us by our friends at Typekit.

Further improvements are certainly possible, but for the time being, we hope the current changes make your Typblography experience a bit more pleasant!

These days, almost anyone you talk to can name their favorite font. Likewise, virtually every business, whether large or small, as well as an ever-increasing number of individuals, maintain a website or blog. What if you could use your favorite font on your blog or website? With the advent of web fonts, the chances of being able to do just that are increasing day by day. In fact, this recently happened to Chelsey Scheffe as you can see from the screen capture of her blog post dated August 30 of this year. As we recently announced, Adobe has made several of its most popular typefaces available for @font-face embedding via Typekit’s service, and we plan on adding even more in the future.

Nothing Relevant blog using Adobe Garamond. Rendered in Chrome on Windows XP.

But, just because you can use your favorite font on the web, should you? This article is the second in our weekly series on web fonts, and seeks to lay out some very basic, practical design considerations to keep in mind when choosing type that is intended to be viewed on screen in the context of the web. I will thus focus on the more technical aspects of choosing type. For further guidance on choosing and pairing type, I strongly recommend reading Robert Bringhurst’s excellent Elements of Typographic Style, particularly the sixth chapter, which is entitled “Choosing & Combining Type.”
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[This inaugurates a series of posts every Wednesday covering subjects related to fonts on the web. -CS]

In my previous post announcing our fonts on Typekit, I mentioned that we have included various optical sizes (also sometimes called optical masters), and mentioned that they might be useful in web design. I thought it would be a good idea to cover this subject in more detail, to explain what optical sizes are and why the rules for using them on the web are still hard to pin down. Continue reading…

Today we’ve got some great news. Some of the best typefaces in the world are now available for use on the web.

Anybody who creates for the web has heard of web fonts by now. Every popular web browser now supports font delivery over the web (via the CSS @font-face rule), giving designers more typographic options than ever before. We here at Adobe have been looking for the best way to get some of our most popular designs to you, so today we’re excited to announce a partnership with Typekit, the web font pioneers of San Francisco who, since last year, have been leading the way in web font technology and delivery. Continue reading…

I’d like to use this opportunity to share some artwork created recently for the TypeGallery exhibition at TypeCon2010 this month in Los Angeles. All of the typefaces we’ll be showcasing there have been created and/or published within the past twelve months.

Below is a thumbnail of our poster for Adobe Text Pro. Adobe Text is a new and versatile text typeface family designed by Robert Slimbach for Western (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic) typesetting. The font family is currently one of complementary benefits to CS5 customers who complete and submit their profile information. This poster was designed by Robert Slimbach. (Click on it to see a larger version.)

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