Fonts for the masses (of designers)
Right on, Mr. H!
Andrei Herasimchuk has just written an open letter to John Warnock at Adobe, suggesting that he, and really Adobe, contribute a small group of roughly 10 core fonts to the public domain. That’s not so cool. What’s cool is the rationale behind the request. If these fonts — fonts like Frutiger, Helvetica Neue and Warnock Pro — go public and are released in Windows and MacOS distributions, then web designers might be able to use more than FIVE fonts for designing web pages.
Given the technological limitations that web designers face, what with problems in cross-browser support for standards as well as requirements for testing sites on multiple platforms (mac, win, cell phones, screen readers), it would be nice if we got a break for once, and were able to expand our design options beyond Helvetica, Times, Trebuchet, Georgia and Verdana. As nice as those are, the inability to rely on any kind of typographical range is a real handicap. If you’ve ever wondered why many “Web 2.0″ sites look alike, look no further than the choice of 3 good sans-serif fonts that are truly avaliable cross-platform. Choice of fonts will allow our sites to have unique character and identity. Seriously — if Adobe released just 10 fonts in this manner, it would triple the number of available choices.
Mr. H, you have my support.
Ranunculus occidentalis var. occidentalis (Ranunculaceae); Western buttercup
[...] Some developers and designers have started an open letter campaign to Microsoft, Apple and Adobe in an effort to raise awareness of the issue. The problem seems to be licensing and, to some degree, there’s probably some greed or communication issues involved somewhere as well. [...]