[Music]
welcome back to kaya theater everyone uh
next up we have andy fitzsimon telling
us about producing an open font in 2022.
since the dot-com boom andy fitzsimon
has fancied himself as an open source
designer one who prefers all the
creative tools he uses to be free to
modify adapt and share
professionally andy has served as global
brand manager at red hat and various
developer roles before joining outfit io
as their head of strategy
andy loves free typography and has
overseen the creation of the many open
source typeface creations from the
original ubuntu font to red hat's many
font contributions to more recently the
outfit type space type face that's an
important word to say
properly for this talk
um
okay so andy will be taking questions
after this talk there should be a bit of
time for questions so please make sure
you post questions you've got for andy
in the questions tab at the top of the
chat in venulis and i'll pass them on at
the end of the talk
thank you andy over to you
fantastic thank you for the lovely
introduction um so yeah hi everybody i'm
andy uh i'm a
free software graphics guy and um look
this presentation is just to do justice
to the amazing uh software maturity
that's out there in the open font land
there was once a time where i could make
a really cheap and nasty font and that's
good enough to class at an open source
fund but i tell you the quality
of this process and the rigor and also
just uh the potential of of what's
happening in this space it's really
skyrocketed and that's thanks to a few
people but in no small part my good
friends dave crossland who leads the
google fonts team and uh look without
him the written word would be decades
decades in the past when it comes to our
digital interfaces uh not just in
you know competence but also in
you know um culture like it's it's just
an insane privilege to know that these
are living legends and dave what what an
absolute champion so he's helped me with
this presentation uh he's not here to
deliver it he's moving to denver at the
moment so good on you dave
but let's see if i can do the poor man's
version of what his presentation
would be so let's crack on
so there's really kind of one main theme
for you to get across in in in fonts and
that is that fun choice matters uh you
know uh how we set the words that we
communicate is sometimes as important as
the words themselves i give you a little
cheeky example but you can think about
this open font it's called you know
parisian i think and look that's just
lovely you think about if i say i will
always find you who's writing that
that's this guy hell romantic really uh
sweeney uh definitely um you know
setting the tone of those words
appropriately
you could also write the exact same
phrase
like this and who's writing that
probably this guy okay it's the same
copy it was animated in in the same way
but yeah you can kind of see the fonts
do make a difference to the content that
they represent
it's not just an arbitrary thing i think
we all kind of get that
to save you some time if you want to
check out the openshift presentation
that's happening at the same time as
this
go to google fonts knowledge they've
just launched this knowledge base and it
kind of helps you
think in fonts
and actually appreciate funds choose
fonts
understand you know
the visual hierarchy is the rhythm the
you know where you set type everything
it's an amazing resource and it's it's
fairly green so check that out if you're
still with me let's do a little bit of a
history lesson so i'm going to talk
about font files in particular so that's
you know the files that that have fonts
in them
it was a pretty scary uh place you know
not too long ago right like who
remembers this sort of stuff we're
talking like power packs you know kind
of like the bargain bin at a at a retail
store that kind of stuff what i love is
this um you know on the right hand side
they're saying make your documents
explode in 3d
i don't really want my documents to
explode but okay and on the left hand
side it's like d is your cd-rom drive
you know like it's just reminding me of
the the times where that was kind of a
thing um and and i'm you know ashamed to
admit it but i visited that 1001 free
font site like all the time super crazy
but that's um a bit of a blast from the
past
uh let's let's go on a little bit
further
nowadays it's a
it's a hell of a lot different to that
there are still you know really
commodity fonts out there of varying
levels of quality produced you know
halfway by hobbyist and whatever else
but hey we're we're living in 2022 we
have a heap of great software and only
hipaa grade software we have a heap of
know-how about the processes you know to
build software and that is everything
from distributed division control to you
know scripting frameworks to
hella cool languages like rust and we
also have you know again open source to
help us kind of catalyze and drive the
stuff together in particular uh this
thing so
2006 uh nicholas spellinger and victor
gauntley they they got together victor
is a type designer and uh nicholas
worked for a
literacy organization called sil
and they came up with the open font
license because it's kind of hard to
interpret
fonts like font files and font software
as software you know there is so much
about the art and also you know some
logistics that make it a little bit
harder to
you know consider the traditional
software licenses appropriate for a font
project so there are a few gaps
and nicholas you know has worked
tirelessly and created this license and
uh because of that we've kind of had a
renaissance of fonts
being open sourced you know the right
way so massive props to them
let's crack on a little bit and i'm
going to give you
i don't know the real quick version of
the history of typography kind of a fun
one a little bit cherry-picked but hey
that's what we're here for so
we'll kind of get into the first movable
type
it was in the song dynasties in china
then we get into metal type right so you
know wooden templates of of stuff to be
printed it breaks whereas metal stays
around so good on you there's a really
cool
learning website that kind of shows you
the history of movable type there which
is awesome then we have that moment the
gutenberg bible which is you know the
first proper printing press pretty
powerful moment for the history of
communication
uh and then hey we kind of cranked it up
a notch with the industrial revolution
that's awesome and then we started kind
of getting into a bit more of the the
commercial day um with one of my you
know
heroes of design i guess uh beatrice
ward she worked for monotype uh at a
time
she's written this which is just you
know freaking awesome uh and inspiring
again like there's
um a heap of badass stuff that this this
lady was in but one thing she left did
was lift the profile of typography um
you know and the importance uh in the
commercial space as well as just in the
mindshare of people that were
communicating
um you know she came up with this one
phrase which is probably one of my
favorite phrases discussing typography
which is
you know people take a vivid interest in
the clothes that words wear
which is probably the nicest way of
putting
what a font is you know we have our
words and then we have the clothes that
we dress them in which is awesome
um and she wrote a whole bunch of really
cool articles underneath this uh
pseudonym called
paul bujon so she got a job working for
monotype and then they found out she was
a woman you know after they gave her the
job
um naturally done beatrice sweet
so that's um
that that's uh yeah again just to kind
of get you into
um a little bit of hero worship right
there let's go into the more specific
stuff though and this is the you know
relevant part to us is that digital
typography has kind of moved um a little
bit further technically the first font
you know that didn't have any digital
font that didn't have any physical
presence
was this digi grotesque you know by this
digi set machine uh it was effectively
like a crt kind of style projector so
technically it's a digital font and uh
and yeah
that that came out of this machine here
around 1978 um this guy you know
everyone i hope i hope you know donald
move um most software developers every
software developer does i think he's
been called the
yoda of silicon valley um and has done
way more than just text and metaphor but
i'll focus on them um because
the modernization
of typography was happening from old
letterpress style type setting
to you know the crt style you know
projection or whatever else
um
yeah donald knuth uh and also fonts were
kind of like all bitmapified um donald
knuth was like no no we can we can use
algorithms and parameters to describe
letter forms
um and he came up with some of the you
know most eloquent um primatizations of
typography uh written purely in software
um and between text for you know text
layout and metaphone for actually
describing the letter forms
um you know it revolutionized uh
academic publishing and also you know
inspired a hell of a lot of stuff in
computer graphics so hell yeah donald
knuth
then there's kind of the famous um
attribution whereby you know had steve
jobs not attended a calligraphy class
you know had he not dropped into that at
stanford he probably wouldn't have had
such a priority to put calligraphic and
other font display types in the 1984
macintosh
but again you know more people at play
uh he was very inspired with um adobe
who came out with pro script and that
was put into mac os one and that gave us
helvetica times korea you know a heap of
great stuff
um and this was you know pretty cool
because um yeah this is we're talking
vector title um coming around the corner
so
then we get the uh apple microsoft kind
of
windows 3
os 7
period where um true type fonts you know
the format kind of comes around
um and it's also around the same time as
the into the cold war coincidentally but
yeah 1989 pretty cool time because um
that exploded uh the the ease in which
fonts can be you know produced and also
the commoditization of computing around
you know just both of those platforms um
meant that fonts became more and more
important uh important to our collective
consciousness which is cool
uh and then 1991
unicode hell yeah
so uh i know if you're old enough and
you know old enough in the internet
years um isolate 59-1
um that's great if you're a westerner
but it sucks if you live anywhere else
unicode has been steadfastly working on
you know a
character range you know and
um yeah it's improved every single year
it's super exciting some of the things
they're coming out with but
that kind of helped
all computers communicate globally which
is fantastic
um you know
that's that's pretty fantastic there
and then in 1996 um
the nintendo 64 came out i didn't get
one but you know i played golden a few
times
open type came out which is pretty
awesome now open type is
super important to the maturity of fonts
because up until open type you had a
font and you had one character
expression per character and you also
didn't have things like ligatures so um
the the font that we've just finished
the outfit font uh it has two ampersands
it has a soft ampersand it has a hard
ampersand it has two e's one e on a 45
degree angle another e that's flat on
you know you can have these stylistic
alternates within an open type font um
to you know describe different shapes
and kind of choose them as you're using
the font which is pretty awesome and the
same goes for ligatures right you can
write a word with you know tf or ti or
whatever else and you can join those two
glyphs into a single glyph uh if the
open type font describes it which is
pretty fantastic and other things like
you know style caps and whatever but
yeah open type was was pretty huge
because hey it supported unicode which
is fantastic and thank you microsoft and
adobe for bringing that to the world
um then you know there had been plenty
of ways um to to get fonts on the web
but you can remember system fonts were a
pretty big deal uh in the early 2000s
well and there were there was you know
microsoft had its eot but it was not an
open i mean it was you know just their
standard um web fonts came out thanks to
collaboration between mozilla opera w3c
um and that year google fonts was
proposed it was launched the following
year but you know the second we were
able to use um web fonts you know as a
standard through web browsers
here comes google fonts
and then in 2016
finally if you've been really interested
in what donald knuth was doing with
metaphones and that's programmatically
describing you know the different
uh that you can change you know fonts
with um variable fonts actually you know
became a thing and uh the first um two
projects to support it was half buzz and
also free type so open source kind of
led the way um and this is in large part
if you remember you know bedadd who who
started um or who worked extensively on
pengo which is now half buzz
um has been responsible for
so much um you know as far as you know
uh text um layout and also being able to
support fun features and whatever else
and you can see here on this slide
there's a little example um you can see
the dollar sign kind of loses its stem a
little period that's you know um
primatized and you can also see that
kind of like the slant on the percentage
changes and whatever else
that's all awesome
these projects half buzz in particular
it's so successful that
professional publishing software like uh
adobe's photoshop has migrated from
their own text layout engine to half
buzz and it's really funny because if
you think about some of the
persian and indic languages the text
layout is more accurate
in photoshop than it is on
desktop publishing tools like
illustrator and indesign and that's
because
um they use half bars in photoshop but
they still have their own proprietary
stack for illustrator and indesign so
it's kind of funny that you get a better
typography experience in a tool because
it's upstream is actually the open
source project versus what they've had
you know decades of of polishing on and
that's largely because of you know the
the fact that hey open source rocks
let's crack on to the next one
and this year
something cool is coming out
and that is color gradient vector fonts
and also what this kind of means is
custom images so if you think about the
entire emoji range
that's a lot of pictures uh and most of
them are bitmaps which you know is is
pretty heavy-handed so you could really
you know reasonably create a web font
with emoji on them with emoji
and expect that web font to be a pretty
small http request you know you're
probably going to have a pretty heavy um
typeface whereas the color gradient
vector fonts um they allow the you know
potential of custom emoji through a web
font which is pretty awesome and not
just custom emoji but
color full color substitutions for
absolutely any character um including
plenty of the features that you'd expect
in in typography so these two examples
linuxconf and google and or linux
conveyor they're all using the color
gradient vector font format and if
you're using chrome 98 it's supported
and it's potentially coming down the
pipe uh in firefox that's you know
currently been approved for
investigation in upstream so but that's
super cool because um i mean
it's it's gonna be horrible for the two
years after this thing is released
because everyone's gonna use it for all
kinds of crazy stuff but it means um
uh it means that we'll be able to have
custom interfaces custom software
really good sites and experiences that
leverage standard unicode instead of
having to hack in svg solutions and
whatever else
as their texts
but what they can still get is the
aesthetic benefit of you know very like
changing what the glyph should look like
so super exciting there all right so now
here we are into today
so if you wanted to get a font
there's a heap of solutions obviously
one of the most trusted sources of
quality fonts is fonts.google there's
the font library open foundry
and also if you just search for fonts on
github and gitlab you can get some
really compelling fonts there's
programmer fonts and nerdfonts and
everything else if you're into that
some of these are more
based on you know variable fonts there's
vfonts.com and whatever else but these
are all great sources
but we're not just going to talk about
getting a font you know which is you
know awesome especially if you want a
starting point because starting with an
upstream project is the best way to go
about making a font
or you know putting a font
well there's the darling of the day
which is um
it's a proprietary piece of software but
it is the best like it is when i say the
best i mean it is really compelling and
easy to use so that's why most
font designers use it including the font
designer that designed our most recent
typeface there is font lab which was the
standard for the longest time so red
hat's overpass was
produced in font lab initially and then
migrated over to glyphs
so that's that's interesting and then
there's robofont which has really really
extensive
python support and scripting languages
surrounding it and you can do lots of
hackable things but not just those three
commercial options there is font forge
and i use that to produce
the original ubuntu font make it rest in
peace
and then there's also uh runebender
which um is completely written in rust
uh and extremely ambitious but in the in
the early days um which is which is kind
of awesome and then there's this uh
mfek which is again new and ambitious
but it's kind of trying to reconcile
what room bender is trying to do with
what front forge is trying to do and get
something um you know that isn't 100
rust but you know a usable good font um
editor um that you know is just as
powerful as as the three above so
really interesting activity happening
there and it's all like it's all active
there's there's been you know no
slowdown in the momentum of this this is
absolutely like a really charged space
one resource that i'd like to point you
towards
even if you're going to choose to use
a tool that isn't fun forge
is this designed with fontforge.com so
that's the user manual effectively for
font forge and it doesn't just teach you
how to use font forge it teaches you how
to think like it teaches you how to be a
type designer um and and really um
you know it makes you better at that
craft it's it's a fantastic resource
that goes through kind of trusting your
eyes
being intuitive knowing what forces are
at play you know when it comes to
optical interference and whatever else
um and absolutely just a stunning read
even if you're never going to make a
font i suggest you check that one out
it's pretty awesome
so now let's kind of get into um the
more techy part
of this which is
what impressed me so like i said at the
start of this talk
way back when when i made a font i could
just fling it over to a random
repository or post it on a you know a
static file share and you know it'd go
up on a website and i'd be like sweet i
open source the fun i released it hey
everybody that's it but
fonts have become so much more pervasive
in how they're used and web fonts in
particular you know that are being
hosted on central cdn's like google
fonts
they really need rigorous quality
control because let's just say you
update your phone you could you could
break the internet um you know you could
actually break the internet by uh
changing the baseline of your typeface
accidentally or
missing a character or setting a decimal
wrong on a unit width and you could you
know do do all kinds of things to all
kinds of online software um or websites
simply because you know the cdn will
faithfully update based on what's the
latest upstream um and if they didn't
have checks to prevent against that kind
of stuff that's where we'd be um but
fortunately uh google and the community
surrounding the modern typeface
development um have come up with some
fantastic stuff some really really
fantastic tools um and here's the four
kind of main ones so
uh google fonts have their own you know
gf tools uh there's font make and then
there's the font tools um they're pretty
good for different things obviously gf
tools is good for working within the
font ecosystem font make is a
source to image kind of compiler so you
don't have to have um it'll it'll do the
building for you so you can you know
automate your font building process
rather than having to do it manually
which allows you to do a whole bunch of
the crcd stuff
and then there's a really really
powerful tool called font bakery which
brings a lot of those tools together
and gives you effectively a linting
experience of of your type design so
i'll kind of get into a little bit of
that but um fontbaker is definitely the
one that impressed me the most um and
there's ways that it's being used
you know even more impressive which is
cool
so if you go um it's probably one of the
most interesting parts of places on the
internet to check out what's happening
in upstream fonts and that's because
you're seeing effectively the this is
the release management process for
google fonts it's completely public um
they have this kanban board available to
you know anybody to check out on github
um and you can see all down the
left-hand side there's needs you know
like some of these uh point releases for
existing fonts some of them are
completely new fonts some of them need
like certain changes some of them
haven't passed
certain tests
it's really really you know
quite rigorous
how
all of this stuff makes it into the main
repository which is you know super cool
so won't go too deep into this but if
you just want to see this stuff in
action it's kind of fantastic
there's also if you're getting started
as a font project i highly highly highly
recommend that you use
google's unified font repository as your
base even if you have no intentions of
publishing this thing to google fonts
this thing sets up you know the github
actions for you it sets up all of the
you know automatic um you know font
analysis tools to give you great
feedback on your project
and it also has the build tools there so
you can build your font without having
to do all that stuff manually so it's a
pretty fantastic
resource for you if you're interested in
that
um and yeah look this is kind of what it
looks like if if you commit a change to
to you know your upstream repository um
it'll run an ocean of tests uh and
produce a self-hosted github pages
website where you can run through and
get your feelings really hurt because of
the number of errors it shows you some
of those errors are just warnings and
they're totally fine and you can go yes
i know i haven't added my copyright yet
or yes i know that you know this glyph
is suspiciously like this glyph or
whatever else
but it's a fantastic tool especially
when you when you're you know releasing
right because
we're working on the outfit font and you
know the artwork was completely finished
and testing was done and we you know
tried to break it 100 different ways
within our browser within our desktop
publishing tools within whatever
and then we actually put it through the
font bakery process and hey we had a
hell of a lot of stuff to to um you know
remediate but you know it wasn't that
hard because we had really specific
directions so
font bakery is fantastic for for that
um
so yeah like this font do you want to
find oh
god ugliest thing ever hacked together
in
um fun forge it wouldn't survive today
um
as as they find the quality like you
know it's it's not fit for use
overpass however is a really interesting
story in that the source artwork was the
u.s federal highways
typeface yeah usually called highway
gothic um that was the inspiration but
the digitization of overpass was a
completely new commission
and we commissioned it because that was
the aesthetic that was
you know leading the red hat brand at
the time
and
since red hat has moved on from overpass
and now uses red hat display and red hat
text and red hat mono which is you know
their new mono space font the overpass
project with its monospace variant and
its 19 variations
including italics obviously and you know
10 or 10 weights i think 10 weights now
probably 9 weights
it
it has been
maintained upstream and not only has it
been maintained upstream by delve who is
fantastic but i can you know an entire
community of people are you know not
just suggesting improvements but
some people have commissioned
improvements uh google has commissioned
you know a a massive overhaul so that
they could get it working with their
crcd tool so
yeah it's pretty pretty incredible
i'll just go on to the next one and
accept cookies all so bad
so yeah this is the most recent font
that we've just put out so
the organization i work for outfit we're
a brand automation company and we needed
a a typeface really had a logo mark that
looked you know pretty pretty much like
this
uh and we we started to commission a um
bespoke typeface so that it could
actually you know work um in you know so
that when we spoke it looked like us
right so one of the you know best
instruments of success in branding is
if you're writing something or if you
have something and you know without
seeing the logo or the name of your
company the aesthetic tells you it tells
the audience who's familiar what what
brand it is it gives them that
recognition in that recall that's kind
of cool but honestly we're also just
design nodes and we wanted to make
something super fun
so you can see here
you can see that we have a stylistic g
when we turn off the alternates it
changes we have the stylistic m and a
stylistic k a stylistic
e everything else uh and we also you
know one of the technical requirements
was that
when we typed uh outfit we had this one
gigantic ligature
that you know combines the ou tfit
exactly as it's meant to be said
uh and the great thing is you know
we can do that we can do that because
hey it's software um we also were able
to you know put together
varying weights so as you noticed before
in that earlier demo the dollar sign
crossbar cuts off um when you you know
get beyond 500
but you know it's it's there when you
get down to the lower and everything
else um and yeah look it's it's just a
pretty awesome typeface um but anyway
let's get into some of the cool future
stuff um for for the later part of this
talk
so firstly
vector technology in general hasn't
slowed down um if you remember previous
lcas i've probably demoed inkscape with
a spline type called spyro splines which
are you know
really awesome and perfect and
everything else
but ray flavin who um
started spyro also started kill which
eventually became sodipatty which
eventually became inkscape
he's been doing a lot of research on how
to create a spline that's very intuitive
to use um you know not just creating
beautiful shapes and paths but also just
super intuitive to use um and if you go
to his blog you can see some of the
experiments and you know this guy
doesn't just write a blog he he creates
live demos it's it's just such a
compelling read
we've got a new kind of
uh you know player in the open source
design toolkit and that's penpot um if
you're familiar with another tool called
figma i think they're worth about 10
billion dollars now well penpot is a
completely open
alternative to figma so if you're into
application user experiences on anything
else it's there but one of the cool
things is you know it has fantastic font
support so you can kind of load up any
of the open fonts you like and start
designing great svg vector compositions
with it which is fantastic
um and just coming around the corner we
have some exciting stuff
personally i'm pretty stoked on the
goose energy coming i'm going to get a
hell of a lot of mileage out of that one
but yeah unicode 15 is around the corner
and that's um
that's cool
but color fonts plus you know the
unicode editions that's um that's going
to be really awesome because
what you can do with color fonts uh is
before unicode has even kind of come out
and your platform has created an imagey
i mean you know after unicode's released
let's say there's a period of
four months before your operating system
creates the imagery character for the
character that you want like you know i
want i want my image for lavender now
right well what you can do with web
fonts and color gradient fonts is you
can actually design your lavender imagey
yourself and have a website that uses it
as a web font
and you know once the operating systems
release the system specific version of
the lavender yeah it can gracefully
degrade and use the system font if you
don't have web fonts but it's really
nice for artists and type designers that
we can kind of
run ahead of the base operating system
and start creating glyphs um that you
know uh in the specification but not yet
supported by a platform so that's
freaking awesome um so anyway that's
kind of it i'd like to you know thank
dave again for a hell of a lot of the
conversations we had to kind of bring
this talk together um and you know thank
you to work for giving me some time to
prepare it um but yeah let's let's move
on to some questions if we have any
ah thanks andy yes we do have questions
sorry i'm just like looking really
surprised because i'm typing and talking
at the same time which is never good um
that was really lovely
as somebody who only
knows about fonts as i guess a user and
appreciator and frequent reader of
things
i really enjoyed the kind of
behind-the-scenes glimpse in the history
tour um
that was really eye-opening thank you
thank you okay we have a few questions
um so
uh
our first question
is it a never-ending task of glyph
coverage as the unicode code points
expand
no you get to choose where you stop
you know just like painting a house i
stopped at the gutters
um
but i i do i do get what you mean if you
were trying to create a typeface that
had full coverage um and unicode is
continuously adding
you know
emoji characters etc uh then yes okay
yes uh you know fully complete set will
probably have to evolve with that
project having said that you know like
our
our typeface stops at extended latin so
we don't support korea japan china you
know or any of the persian or index
grips um you know and and many of the
cyrillic you know characters are also
not there um we've got a couple poor
issues asking for hungarian characters
stuff like that in the upstream um
and yeah like like any open source
project you can say hey
this is cool yes we want to get there
but it's not yet um or this project it's
out of scope for us to ever attend to
that
and when it comes to character glyph
coverage for language um
just speaking for the outfit project
yeah we totally want to have
um we want to grow
because it's a commercially kind of
backed font we want to grow as the
markets we address you know are needed
right so if we want to do business
um you know uh in the middle east we
have to have those persian fonts um you
know same with korea japan and china if
we want to do business in in japan we
want to project that competence by
having our own custom typeface then we
need the glyph coverage um you know of
those of these characters um the the
cool projects to look at is probably
google's noto project which started as
uh just you know i think
um english alphabet and grew
uh into korea japan and china and then
grew into you know
like it i think there's like a sanskrit
version now like you know it's it's an
enormous enormous project and it's yeah
it's forever growing um but yeah like i
said you get to choose where you where
you start
if i'm going to add one imagey to an
upstream font project it might just be
like the koala imagey and that'll be in
my web font and it'll be a nice small
http request payload that you know won't
point um tanker website
but that answers a good choice really
um
the next question
i am really curious about tests you run
on fonts can you give us some examples
of the checks you think are the most
useful
uh yeah look a lot of the a lot of the
checks obviously when it comes to
release management and open source
licensing is a big one licensing and
naming is pretty huge
glyph coverage was something that
blocked us
because we only wanted to have like the
qwerty set as a character range
initially and google rightfully said
we're not going to host you fine you
know because we have a minimum character
set so checking for that just checking
that you have you know all the
characters with diacritics that are
needed
to be compatible with the places that
you plan to host and use your font and
that's kind of nice because you know we
all we all miss stuff right like it it
could be
you know you could have
you can use the font and and
there could be system curly braces and
you didn't notice that you forgot to do
the curly brace characters um so that's
kind of nice
but yeah there's lots of gotchas um it's
a really really extensive list of checks
um if you have a look at any font bakery
output on any open source project
and they're all super cool like it's
it's really insightful
to see what those things are
that's fascinating
um can you make any comments about
application specific fonts other than
web or print for example hershey font
for plotting outline fonts for cutting
oh okay
look
some
some people are hacking fonts to be
interface elements because it does give
them um
a really highly compatible set of
controls to do user interface stuff that
is not
um you're just worried about doing that
sort of thing in css or another method
a great example is if you have a
application that cannot have much
dom effect in javascript for example or
you know you want or little to no
no javascript at all like in a web app
for example like on the client side
uh what you can do
is you can have a lot of interactivity
um purely using web fonts and css right
so you can actually have like you know
you can draw whatever element you want
embed that as a variable font and then
have those elements interact
using the variable parameters via css
and that's kind of like a really
interesting application because you know
you can draw anything and you won't get
you know um
you know it'll it'll run uh
in in the data center of a bank and
it'll pass infosec checks like i don't
know like it's it's kind of like you can
you can hack web font tech into all
kinds of interesting interfaces now
that sounds like
quite the rabbit hole to explore yeah
yeah
i mean it's pretty cool though because
again
variable fonts like you know you can
draw all kinds of stuff
in the same way that ascii arts a thing
like now you've got ascii art plus the
power to do so much with the typography
within it so
yeah
keen on on the terminal stuff
so much fun to be had
okay next question is
what are you most excited about in the
next one to two years in the open font
space
honestly i think the proximity to
software rigger
has really elevated it i know lots of
designers that collect commercial
typefaces like um entrepreneurs collect
domains you know like oh i'll use that
in a project at some point
um and it's kind of
it's it's nice to see that with the
right kind of um
the right kind of you know practices to
ensure really really high quality fonts
ends the fact that there's so much
visibility and you know priority and
advocacy for them um
you know i'm excited to see where that
goes for the creators uh of typefaces
and what that means for everything from
funding models to projects and and all
those things in between you've got to
remember that
uh 20 years ago commissioning a custom
digital typeface you know was a you know
multi hundreds of thousands of dollars
endeavor um to produce right so that
that was usually reserved for the
largest organizations in the world that
still had a need for a custom typeface
but were able to pay for those projects
now
it's become much easier to produce these
things and also much easier to you know
release those things
so you know i work for a medium-sized
business and we're able to commission
commission a bespoke font um and you
know it's because the tooling was there
the technology was there the release
management was there um and and there's
also you know there's economic
incentives to to be better at your
branding and thai faces are a
like one of the quintessential pieces of
of a branding aesthetic so i'm really
excited about that
um and i love the fact that
i didn't even have to fight for our font
to be open source
if we wanted it released on google fonts
it had to be open source so that's one
of the biggest
gravitational pulls to contributions to
the commons that you can think of
the payoff for us is you know g suite
will use fonts from google fonts
therefore if we ever wanted to use g
suite with our corporate typeface we
actually had to open source our typeface
i love that i just love that the
economics played in the advantage of an
open project rather than even
entertaining the discussion of what if
we keep a proprietary just wasn't it you
couldn't even do it wasn't a question
yeah that's huge
that that really must make quite a huge
influence it's great
yep and um whether we're good at
business without a business there'll be
something useful for artists and
creators you know so it's nice
that is lovely
um on the topic of uh
collecting fonts and discovery um
there's a question is there an app out
there that makes finding and installing
open fonts on linux super easy i think
there used to be a few apps like this on
windows in the day
i think they were on the cds you
mentioned
god damn
yeah yeah i love i love that that was
something that i would have spent like
20 bucks on like you know 1 000 fonts um
yeah that and i probably have a few of
them somewhere
uh but as far as if you go to flat hub
there's like a bunch of different font
installer applications um off the top of
my head
uh i don't know many but it's also
super easy to install a file on linux
right like if it's your home directory
um just create a you know private
directory called fonts in your home and
then whatever you throw on there will be
sucked up by most uh desktop um you know
desktops so
that's you know as
as plain as it can get
um
yeah i've installed
fonts individually on linux like that um
yeah and the coolest thing is then you
can just go and track upstream and just
do like a big you know like get pull
depth dash one of whatever project you
like and you know you can update it
yourself if you ever want
that's cool i haven't tried that um i
guess the other aspect of the question
is about do you have any recommendations
around discovery of specifically open
spot fonts
for those of us who aren't immersed in
the world like you are
yeah yeah so i have a list on these
slides we'll put them put them out there
um but look google fonts really is
such a good archive of these fonts
regardless how you feel about google as
a cdn or player in the cloud space
they have made an enormous
contribution to the quality and breadth
and depth of fonts
and that's undeniable and it's still a
great place to discover and learn
and you know get fonts um font library
and open foundry are both pretty
fantastic as well um and then yeah look
there is you know the the major
repositories like um you know there are
there are so many exciting font projects
that are coming together um in
particular you know um programmer fonts
and ide fonts um if you use
you know the power line um character set
for your terminal you know like that
there's a heap of fonts that have been
branched just so that they can add extra
characters um or extra icons
and you'll find you you'll have to find
them upstream you'll have to go to you
know github or gitlab or wherever they
are
but but this is a pretty good set of
places to discover
on just got a very specific question has
just been added that i i have to ask um
whatever happened to open baskerville
uh
lee what is libra baskerville
um but open baskerville i'm not familiar
that might be the one that simon was
working on maybe
um and i'm not i'm not um i'm not
certain of the the history there um
but i will take this opportunity to say
that my favorite ampersand in the world
is the baskerville italic ampersand so
i hope that helps
that that's good to know coming from
like you're you're an actual like design
person who knows fonts so that's a high
recommendation
libra baskerville is a great is an open
baskerville project for what it's worth
so um you can get that um
at fund library or fonts.google and
it's a real thing and it's great i'll
have to look that one up myself
um we've got one last question in there
and we've got a minute and a half left
to ask it uh is the line between fonts
and unicode code points blurry or is it
just me
um
no no they're they're pretty like you
know fonts most of the fun formats uh
using you know um
the unicode range for their glyphs so
they're kind of
very like
you need you need unicode to
you know set where the character is uh
and you know the font is just displaying
that character however it wants
that's the clothes i loved that quote
you shared
yeah yeah super fun um that's such a
cool quote
that's great i'll remember that one
cool
okay we have been under a minute left if
you've got any last words andy but we're
out of questions hey i hope everybody
has a fantastic saturday and the rest of
lca thanks for putting it on and um
oh i can't i can't help myself if you've
got a marketing department send them my
way
that's kind of it
um i i really enjoyed that as i said
andy thank you so much for telling us
all about the world of
um
open fonts and the current state of
things and a pleasure
cool you later everybody bye