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Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

arun.is

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Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#151

Post by jrockway »

antidesitter wrote: post #108
fsloth wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a hunch. I may be wrong. It seems to me that a font, suitable for printing, is a niche product with a very old history of proprietary providers and craftsmen. It's this crafts aspect which makes the open sourcing a bit more difficult, IMO. I.e you need specialists to maintain a certain quality.

A font doesn’t require continuous maintenance.

I mean... sort of. It seems like hundreds of new emoji are added every few years. They do not draw themselves.

Question is whether or not anyone cares.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#152

Post by Consultant32452 »

H1Supreme wrote: post #85
falcolas wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The artistic aspects deserve respect and attention not just from the practitioners but also from their users. As a developer and sysadmin: Let me know how that works for you. End users will rarely if ever recognize your contributions; will only really notice your contribution when it doesn't work. Sorry.

I worked in graphic design before I made my way into programming full time. My first job was building desktop apps with a team of programmers with very little design sensibilities. As such, there was lots of plain grey, haphazard interfaces. While they functioned fine, they left nearly everything to be desired aesthetically. I received immediate, positive feedback on my initial contributions. Applying basic design to…

When I think of design I think of two very different definitions. The first is as you describe, putting some basic aesthetics and usability on an otherwise "undesigned" page/app/etc. The other definition is how I worked on a team that spent over a week rebuilding buttons because the designer didn't like the way native buttons worked in browsers.

When someone complains about how superfluous "design" is, I always assume they mean the latter definition. But I could be wrong.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#153

Post by mark-r »

ramraj07 wrote: post #54
ardy42 wrote: post #53

> Why are tech companies making custom typefaces? Because they hate me. I disable font smoothing on my machines. Custom typefaces usually have poor hinting, which means they look terrible without smoothing (e.g. inconstant line thickness and inconsistent spacing). The fonts that ship with Windows and Mac OS are wonderfully hinted, and appear crisp and clean without font smoothing. I curse the day web fonts were inven…

Do you still use a 1024 x 768 monitor or what?

Monitor resolutions have been stagnant for a very long time. The 1024 x 768 monitors of old were about the same DPI as today's 1920 x 1080 monitors, since the screens have gotten larger.

I blame Microsoft. For far too long Windows programs haven't been able to scale gracefully, making odd resolutions painful to work with.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#155

Post by [deleted] »

Vanderson wrote: post #28

"The idea that typefaces (rather than fonts, which are computer software) cannot be copyrighted in the United States is black letter law. 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(e). Under U.S. law, typefaces and their letter forms or glyphs are considered utilitarian objects whose public utility outweighs any private interest in protecting their creative elements." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... There is a…

[deleted]

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#156

Post by amyjess »

All I can say is that Noto has been one of the most wonderful gifts Google has given the world.

An ultra-high-quality, visually attractive font family that includes a wide array of weights and even a decent selection of widths on top of what is quite possibly the best Unicode support in the world.

I'm at the point where I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth and just be thankful I have Noto for my typesetting projects.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#157

Post by diiaann »

executesorder66 wrote: post #24
Rotten194 wrote: post #2

I don't think most tech companies actually want a completely custom, radically new typeface. They want a designer to trace Helvetica so they don't have to pay licensing fees.

There are good looking open source fonts. So I don't think that's true.

I think there are plenty of good looking open source fonts, but there aren't that many super solid ones.

Glyph wise, I would love to have both tabular and proportional numbers. I also want great hinting so it looks good on Windows devices. I also prefer something that isn't strongly tied to another brand like Roboto is to Android.

Once you take those into account, there isn't actually a ton of options left. And if you want something that compares to the quality you get Hoefler & Co, you end up with close to zero.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#158

Post by anoncake »

mark-r wrote: post #145
anoncake wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Nimbus Sans?

Nimbus Sans was designed to be a complete lookalike for Helvetica. I'm not sure how they got away with it, except that the IP laws protecting fonts are rather weak. Besides, I don't think it's open source.

Nimbus Sans is not a lookalike for Helvetica, it is a Helvetica. The visual appearance of fonts is not copyrightable. And it's GPL'd.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#160

Post by amyjess »

Jabbles wrote: post #121

I'd like to highlight Google Noto Fonts, which seem to have been made with an entirely different purpose - i.e. not brand recognition: https://www.google.com/get/noto/

I work on anime fansubs as a hobby, mostly as a typesetter, I use Noto Serif as my main dialogue font, and I default to Noto Sans (in various weights and widths) when I need a regular sans to set on-screen text and signs.

It is absolutely perfect. And you know what? I don't think I've gotten a single complaint from anyone about using a serif font for dialogue, which is something that's really uncommon in the fansubbing community (there is a tendency to stick to old taboos, even though the reasons why serif fonts were avoided are no longer valid now that almost everyone, including me, only releases softsubs). It's just that gorgeous.

The widths and weights Noto is available in is also massively useful to me. There have been times I've tried to set some text, observed that the regular is too light and the bold is too heavy... and then I remember that Noto has a demi. Or when it started to irk me that the width of the font didn't harmonize well with the width of the Japanese text and I started to play with \fscx until I realized that I could just use Noto Sans SemiCondensed and get something that's optically sound.

And the best part is that it's all open-source.

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