Archive for the ‘Font’ Category

Something exciting next year Bruno Maag from Dalton Maag has been asked by the Design Museum London to put on an exhibition of his work. This is a collaboration between ourselves and DM, the exhibition will be in two parts a substantial part of which will be featuring the Ubuntu font. Exhibition from 28th January [...]

In contrast to a proportionally spaced font a the characters in a monospace occupy all exactly the same width. In the past monospace type was used on typewriters, and more recently in some specialised printing environments such as Credit Card embossing, or ticketing. Today, monospace fonts are primarily used within a programming environment working on [...]

I hope regular readers of the design blogs don’t think that we have abandoned our programme of telling you all about the font development – I know it’s been a while since the last post. The 10.10 launch and UDS are over and it’s been great to get some feedback from people about how much [...]

Time flies and it’s already time for our next blog entry on the design of the Ubuntu font suite. Below my colleague Fabio Haag explains the joys of spacing and kerning. Type designer from past to present all agree on one thing: the spacing between the letters is as important as the letters themselves, if [...]

Below, Amelie Bonet from the Dalton Maag design team shares her thoughts: Latin Extended B is a block (0180-024F) within the Unicode standard. With its utterly mundane name no-one would guess the wealth of shapes and glyphs. This specific and somehow obscure character set gathers 195 glyphs supporting a good mix of languages from Romania [...]

It’s _almost_ there. Happy “so close to release I can almost taste the Ubuntinis” Day everyone! And if you’ve not tried an Ubuntini, well you should. The next release of Ubuntu releases on the 10th October but the release candidate is out there now and as I write this the final release meeting of the [...]

The Ubuntu font represents the values of Ubuntu and Canonical, distilled into a typeface that is highly legible on screen, clean and balanced in print, professionally designed yet imbued with the wisdom of the whole Ubuntu community. I hope it’s a benchmark for more libre font work, and a catalyst for improvements in the tools of typography.

The Ubuntu project is going full speed. We have started intial work on the Hebrew and would like to share a few thoughts with you. This PDF illustrates how we arrived at some of the basic proportions. Pages 1 to 5 deal with the proportional relationship of the Hebrew height against the Latin x- and [...]

We are familiar with the Latin alphabet; we are used to seeing it’s forms and shapes and we read it without thinking. When we design Latin fonts, we can rely on our intuition and experience to create the letter shapes; we feel when a character is right or wrong. When designing a non-Latin typeface we [...]

Here is a design conundrum: which way to lean the Hebrew Italic design. Logic, and probably common sense, would dictate that it should slant in the reading direction. However, I think we have to consider wider implications on this issue, and I would like to ask for the community’s opinion on this issue. Personally, I [...]