The first milestone

As work on the font continues we thought it would be good to get some insight from the people working on developing it. In the first of these posts, Bruno Maag explains where the team are and what’s coming.

Phew… after months of hard graft, designing altogether over 5,000 glyphs – and hinting them – we have now delivered the remaining two fonts that form the Ubuntu core font set for Beta testing. In the next two or three weeks we’ll fix some bugs and that’s it. They are going to be part of the 10.10 Ubuntu release.

That doesn’t mean that we’re now sitting back; not at all. We’ve already started work on additional font styles such as Light, Medium and Monospace, as well as the core font language extension to Arabic and Hebrew. In the coming weeks and months we’ll keep you updated on the developments of the font, and more importantly, how we arrived at the designs as they are now and our reasoning for them. You’ll hear from the designers directly here at Dalton Maag, the design problems they faced, and how they arrived at solutions. And you’ll hear from me, too, about type design in general and the strategies and structures that have to be created for a successful font suite.

Bruno Maag