Typblography

Here is a wonderful chance to take type and make it dynamic!

A few weeks ago, our friends at FontGear launched a new contest and we invite you to combine type and video in a way that moves us all. And while you’re at it, you can win some cash as well.

And fonts don’t have to be the key theme. Pick one that interests you, but make sure that your videos share some focus on the creative and obvious use of typographic concepts, subjects, and storylines. Entry is free!

Want to add some extra zip to your work? We’ve heard that Adobe has a few products like Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, Flash or After Effects which can help you to be your most creative. But we digress. Whatever your choice of tools, you have a chance to win big. First place takes $1000, Second place $500, and Third place can win you $250.

A jury of industry professionals, featuring Adobe’s own Ginna Baldassarre, will choose the three best font-related videos submitted. So get your type on some tape or your glyphs on some clips, but make sure you enter by September 30, 2010. Time, like a film reel, is always running out!

When Thomas Phinney announced via this blog three years ago that his typeface family was “available,” he left us with a bit of a cliffhanger by telling us that the italics would be forthcoming. Today I can tell you that the wait for the complete family is over. The roman and italic fonts can now be purchased online from our type showroom. We will be offering all of the faces as individual font sales, or available in two packages – one which includes the full family and another which offers only the italics. The package offering only the italics is offered at a special discount of $55 for all the italic fonts (versus $35 per font) and is intended for customers who received Hypatia as a registration incentive and only want the italic faces.

A partial showing of Hypatia Sans Pro Italic

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What’s up with fonts for CS5? The font set shipping with CS5 closely resembles the CS4 set with the following exceptions: The following families have been added to the CS5 font set:

• Adobe Arabic (4 fonts)
• Adobe Hebrew (4 fonts)
• Adobe Fan Heiti Std (1 font, “Bold” weight)
• Adobe Gothic Std (1 font, “Bold” weight)
• Ryo Display PlusN (5 fonts)
• Kozuka Gothic Pr6N (6 fonts)
• Kozuka Mincho Pr6N (6 fonts)

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Now that CS5 has been announced I can finally talk about one of the things that kept me busy. Over on Inspire, Shawn Cheris talks about the new Creative Suite branding system: the grid, the colors, the influences, and… the fonts. Well, he actually didn’t say a lot about the latter which gives me a good opportunity to do so.

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As I mentioned in the Typblography article on January 2nd, 2010, the type designer of our groundbreaking new OpenType Japanese font, Kazuraki (かづらき), won an award in 2002 for her earlier, but similar, typeface design. I am very pleased to announce that Kazuraki, an Adobe Originals typeface design by Adobe’s own Ryoko Nishizuka (西塚涼子), recently won its first award, specifically that it is among the winning TDC2 2010 typeface designs.

We’d like to extend to Ryoko our sincere congratulations for this noteworthy and well-deserved achievement. 本当におめでとうございます！ It is quite an honor to have her on our team.

Our groundbreaking new OpenType Japanese font, Kazuraki (かづらき), is now available for sale on our Type Showroom, including those for Japan, France, and Germany. Click here to be taken to the ordering page, which also includes links to its Specimen Book and Glyph Complement PDFs.

Kazuraki was designed by Adobe Systems’ Senior Typeface Designer, Ryoko Nishizuka (西塚涼子), which began as a typeface called Teika that won the Silver Prize in the Kanji Category at Morisawa’s 2002 International Typeface Competition.

Although Kazuraki is branded as a kana font, and includes a full complement of glyphs for hiragana and katakana, it also includes glyphs for 1,082 kanji, symbols, and punctuation, along with fifty vertical two-, three-, and four-character hiragana ligatures. A defining characteristic of Kazuraki is that is fully-proportional in both writing directions. Some glyphs are wider than they are tall, and vice versa, and this is reflected in the glyph metrics. Below is an example:

For those who wish to read about the production details, Adobe Tech Note #5901 is available, and a Japanese translation is provided.

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I’d like to use this opportunity to share some recent artwork from Type Development at Adobe Systems. This is a thumbnail of a Kazuraki poster that was designed for an internal Tech Fair that will take place during the coming week. Kazuraki is genuinely proportional Japanese font that is based on the writings of Fujiwara-no-Teika, and designed by Adobe’s own Ryoko Nishizuka. This poster was also designed by the font’s designer. (Click on it to see a larger version.)

I was recently asked regarding the Text Layout Framework for Flash and AIR: “It seems to be using system rasterizer (producing different results on Mac v Windows) but flattens output to grayscale. Is that correct? If so does/will Flash expose system rendering as an option or always use its own rasterizer? Or is the Text Layout Framework completely separate from Flash?”

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For folks doing an upgrade, the CS4 font list looks a lot like CS3, except for a few fonts removed, and a new registration incentive: the complete Sanvito Pro family (there will be a new landing page for this family, but it’s not up yet). Sanvito Pro is a versatile informal script face with four weights and four optical size variants for each weight, for a total of 16 fonts.

Typefaces you might have seen in CS3 that aren’t in CS4: Arno Pro, Bickham Script Pro, Garamond Premier Pro. Further typefaces bundled with InDesign CS3 but not InDesign CS4: Bernhard Modern Std, Caflisch Script Pro.

There are more East Asian fonts, notably:
- Adobe Kaiti Std and Adobe Fangsong Std, additional simplified Chinese fonts
- With InDesign and suites including InDesign, the “Pr6N” versions of the Kozuka Gothic and Kozuka Mincho typefaces. These fonts have the Adobe-Japan1-6 character set, and are JIS-2004 savvy.

All in all, still a LOT of fonts, just a slightly smaller set.

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Arial Narrow is fixed! No longer will it be reproducing like crazy… no, wait, not that kind of fix.

Users of many Adobe applications such as InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop have been noticing for a while that the version of the four Arial Narrow fonts that ship with Office 2007 and Windows Vista had a problem. They didn’t show up correctly in the font menus of these Adobe applications. Instead of four styles of Arial Narrow showing up, there would be just one. It was however under the main “Arial” family, unlike the older version of Arial Narrow.

Basically, Microsoft tried to enhance the font menu names for the family, but inadvertently gave all four fonts the same style of just “Narrow” rather than the needed “Narrow Italic” and so on. We worked with them to identify the problem and how to fix it, and they’ve now released the fixed fonts. These will doubtless show up in some future service pack(s) for Office and/or Windows, but until then, follow that link for a “Hotfix.”

ADDENDUM: [added 12 Sep 2008] The process of installing the new fonts may confuse the Adobe font caches. As my colleague Dov Isaacs put it, “The trick is that you need to rebuild the Adobe font cache mechanism. First, exit all Adobe programs. Then, search and delete ALL files of the form AdobeFnt##.lst where ## is a two digit number.”