It’s an exciting day for Adobe Type! Today, we’re releasing two new Adobe Original families for both print and web, Source™ Sans Pro and Leander Script™ Pro. Plus, we have a new set of web fonts available from our partners at Typekit and WebINK.
Continue reading…
‘Myriad’ in Arabic and Hebrew scripts
The ever-popular Myriad type family now has new Arabic and Hebrew members! These have recently been added as part of a suite-wide effort to provide better support for languages of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). These new typefaces were designed and developed by the Adobe type team in San Jose and have already be recognized for their excellence as one of the winners of the Letter.2 competition conducted by the Association Typographique Internationale. A core set of styles from these type families is bundled with Adobe Creative Suite 6 applications. This core set includes four basic styles: Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic. However, the type styles bundled with CS6 include only a small subset of the new Myriad Arabic and Myriad Hebrew type systems that were created to provide a wider range typographic options for designers. To preview and purchase additional styles or the full families, see our pages for Myriad Arabic and Myriad Hebrew. In the future, these pages will include glyph complement showings for the fonts, likewise full digital specimens with text showings are still forthcoming.
I know some of you are wondering what’s up with fonts for CS6. The font set shipping with CS6 closely resembles the set that shipped with CS5. However, the following new families will ship with CS6.
• Adobe Devanagari (4 fonts)
• Adobe Naskh (1 font)
• Myriad Arabic (4 fonts)
• Myriad Hebrew (4 fonts)
The new version of Adobe Reader (10.1.3) released last week includes new functionality that allows users to sign documents electronically. This new capability leverages three fonts that we designed and developed in record time. They emulate the real handwriting of some of our team members and are intended to serve as a proxy to anyone’s signature.
Continue reading…
Last week, the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts was the venue for TYPO San Francisco. TYPO is a series of conferences organized by FontShop, and is well known for its annual installment in Berlin, where designers from all over the world have the chance to talk to a large, interested audience. This concept has recently been exported to London; San Francisco was the first TYPO to be held outside Europe. Obviously, this venture was a success, as initial attendance expectations were exceeded – the event attracted designers from all over the country. Continue reading…
Industrial Design Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Hot on the heels of Todd Macfie’s report on Type Camp India, which I was privileged to attend in December 2009, I decided to publish my experiences from my most recent trip to India. It has been just over two years since I traveled to Chennai for my first visit to India. As part of the Type Camp group, I was there very much in the capacity of learner to study the Tamil script and to document its forms with my own amateur photography.
However, my return trip was to focus on imparting some of the knowledge that I have attained in the intervening years since my initial visit. In particular, I was honored to be able to present at Typography Day 2012. It was an inspiring event to see the state of the art in India in terms of typography, publication design and typeface design. I was somewhat surprised at how much type design was showcased at this conference, which I fully expected to be more focused specifically on typography. It was encouraging to me to see many students active in learning the essentials of type design.
The Robothon conference in The Hague is always an exceptional event, bringing together designers and developers interested in the technical aspects of type design. While it is a great opportunity to meet people and exchange ideas, it is also a place to hear about the latest developments in type technology. This year, many presentations focused on hinting, two of which were presented by members of the Adobe Type Team. Continue reading…
At the ATypI conference 2011 in Reykjavík, I gave a talk entitled “Pitfalls of Pi fonts.” This presentation was the culmination of a project that involved the creation of keyboard layouts for all of our dingbat fonts. The ultimate purpose of this project was the desire to replace obsolete Type 1 (T1) fonts with more current OpenType fonts (OTFs), which was necessary for various reasons, the most important of which being that T1 fonts lack proper Unicode information. On another hand, this shortcoming in the T1 font format was also its greatest advantage: virtually all the glyphs were easily accessible from the keyboard.
Continue reading…
Today marks Robert Slimbach’s 25th anniversary with Adobe. Robert joined Adobe’s Type staff on March 2nd, 1987, as Adobe’s nascent program for original typeface design took shape under the guidance of Sumner Stone. Since then, Robert has accumulated awards and accolades for his work, including the Prix Charles Peignot in 1991, and numerous Type Directors Club awards. In 2006, Robert became Adobe’s first Principal Designer — a title he probably earned in spirit long before that.
On Tuesday, Adobe’s Typekit office hosted the west coast premiere of Linotype: The Film with two back-to-back screenings. A few of us on the Adobe Type team were there and share our thoughts about it:
Linotype historian Frank Romano showing original font drawings for the Linotype.
David Lemon: I really liked Frank Romano’s historical perspective. I’d come across a lot of that material before, but had never learned what inspired Ottmar Mergenthaler to create the first Linotype machine. And as a Type person, I appreciated Nadine Chahine’s point that the machine’s great commercial success supported the development of the world’s preeminent font library – which has long since outlived the machine.
Frank Grießhammer: What I liked is that really all the aspects of the machine were illuminated, from the history of its creation, to the pinnacle of its success, to its replacement by other technologies. Even the Linotype’s value in terms of scrap metal was mentioned, and the difficulties (in sheer personal investment and energy) that are to be taken to keep a Linotype running today. All those facts were embellished with a wealth of ancedotes, e.g. the fascinating story of “etaoin shrdlu.” A great movie, which I can easily see being interesting to festival-goers that are not necessarily 100% type nerds.
Christopher Slye: Honestly, I was grinning for half the film. It’s ambitious enough to make the case that the Linotype was just about the most important invention for human knowledge following movable type itself… but it also finds that the people who have spent their careers operating or otherwise depending on them are smart, proud and funny. It helps that it’s all nicely filmed and briskly paced. A few familiar faces put it all in context for the type enthusiasts and professionals, but it turns out the Linotype — quirky, complex and slightly dangerous — has more universal appeal than expected.
