Archive for the ‘Font’ Category

Some of original sketches for Ubuntu Arabic are about to go on display in Berlin! We’ve talked before about the work done by Rayan Abdullah on drawing and designing the original calligraphy behind the Ubuntu Arabic for the Ubuntu Font Family and from tomorrow you will be able to see that work for yourself. Until [...]

If you’ve ever had to create Ubuntu or Canonical related design materials, chances are you had a look at the Brand Guidelines, which, until now, have only existed in the form of bulky PDFs. Those days are over, as we happily introduce the brand new Ubuntu Brand Guidelines site, where you can read the guidelines [...]

Amélie Bonet at Dalton Maag has drawn up redesigns for a number of the Cyrillic and Serbian/Balkans characters that weren’t as clear, or ideal as they could have been. If you use these characters, please help give feedback about whether the suggested improvements are sufficient, or whether they could be improved further. For Greek, there is also a proposed fix to monospace Gamma.

Kudos to everyone using the Ubuntu Font Family on their websites as a web font! This week the total to date reached over one billion requests—and it’ll go up even faster if you add Ubuntu Mono and Ubuntu Condensed to your sites too. Shortly after the Ubuntu Font Family was added to Google Webfonts directory, [...]

To celebrate Software Freedom Day 2011 we got sent one of the banners showing the new SFD logo. The logo design is based around a custom-modified version of the Ubuntu Font Family (the fonts come with source code, and modification is allowed as long as you follow the rules). There are some photographs showing the [...]

To join the Ubuntu Monospace beta and give feedback, apply to the ubuntu-typeface-interest team on Launchpad and follow the PPA instructions after being accepted. Timeline Hardly a day has gone by in the last six-months without the design team being asking when the Ubuntu Mono monospace is going to be available. Like all of the [...]

The BBC just put up a five-minute audio slideshow “The story of how we got our alphabets” about the development of western writing, starting in 3,000 BC in Mesopotamia with various attempts at proto-writing systems and then Cuneiform script. It shows the history of the alphabet, stemming from the Phoenician alphabet and continuing to the [...]

A beta of Ubuntu Font Family Arabic, in print as part of the testing and debugging process for the Arabic coverage.

The magazine is an intriguing tri-lingual production published by the Cultural Office of Saudi Arabia in Germany … German and English articles using Latin script at one cover and Arabic from the other.

We are now putting the two complex scripts Hebrew and Arabic together. Although the basic design of the Arabic was finalised some months ago we have been doing a lot of background work investigating language support, and thus defining a glyph set. This work has led us to have aprox. another 1,000 glyphs in the font supporting languages such as Kashmiri. Our designer Jonathan Pierini currently has the task (some would say unfortunate) of compiling the various glyphs and their diacritics. Whilst doing this we have come across a few situations which we hope someone from the Ubuntu community can help us with…

Although I haven’t posted much recently we have still been working away. Besides the latest update to Version 0.7 of the core fonts, which posed some technical challenges, we have now finalised the Hebrew Regular and are making good tracks with the Arabic. You may remember the earlier post on the subject of the Hebrew [...]