Archive for the ‘typography’ Category

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 [...]

Warm grey is one of the neutral colours from Ubuntu and Canonical’s colour palette. It has been added to the palette for balance, being a bridge between the vibrant orange and aubergine. The brand guidelines specify that warm grey (hex value: #AEA79F) can be used for: backgrounds, graphics, pictograms, dot patterns, charts and diagrams, and [...]

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 [...]

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…

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 [...]

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 [...]