NEWTYPOGRAPHY
Oswald webfont now get’s pulled over 683,000,000 times per week just from the Google font servers. That sort of usage deserves some extra functionality! Oswald has proved itself as a useful webfont, so it’s a safe bet that more weights for people to play with is a good idea. Work is now under way to add at least 200, 500 and 800 weights. Above and below are examples of the thinnest and boldest weights that are being used in the interpolation set up to create an array of new weights.
Also, some good work has started on Mertz again. This may possibly form the basis of a commercial font release some day. Mertz is based on a ‘mash up’ of several old early Twentieth Century type designs, including some early cuts of Metro, Gill’s Sans, and Nobel. Mertz is not a ‘revival’, or a purist study of old designs.
Rammetto started as a reworking of the old Stephenson Blake design from 1927, ‘Basuto’, with the addition of a set of lowercase characters, as the original Basuto design contained only uppercase characters. ‘Ramo Sans’ (working name) is the result of cleaning up the Rammetto design and then degrading it via some Inkscape filters before re-importing the svg outlines back into FontForge. Ramo Sans is imagined as a distinctive typeface to be used in graphic, display publishing such as magazines, posters and packaging.
‘Jertzy’ (working name) is a crossbreed between the Jinko and Mertz fonts. Work in progress, but it looks like it may be a handy font family some day.
Also, the next few months will see a major expansion and further improvements made to the Oswald webfonts. This work will include the introduction of a Cyrillic character set, and new weights to give Oswald web weights from 200 (Extra Light) to 700 (Bold), and possibly 800 and 900 too. Also developing a Metafont version of Oswald to aid even further expansion to expanded, condensed versions and genetic spin-offs.
Metafont was devised by Donald Knuth in the late 1970′s to define vector fonts to be used as part of the TeX typesetting system. One characteristic of Metafont is that the forms and construction of glyphs are defined purely via geometrical equations. These equations can describe multiple fonts and the interpolation between them. Knuth devised this system so that the typesetter using TeX had access to, for example, multiple font weights from within a single Metafont file (a ‘meta’ font). Using Metapost based tools, we can interpret Metafont data to output as postscript fonts. So we can create fonts in the Metafont language and output an array of instances as web browser readable fonts.
‘Seven’ is a sans serif typeface (above), being created as part of a project to create families of related webfonts using Metafont data. The power of Metafont is that potentially large amounts of separate webfonts can be created from a single file. Not just the ‘weight’ of glyphs can be controlled, but also the glyph width, the ’roundness’ of curves, aspect ratio, font slant, stroke width, and lots more. In the future, type could be produced, en masse, and on demand, by freedom loving fontbots.
As a result of some commercial custom work to build extra weights for the Muli Font family, Muli will soon have a few more weights to play with. Heavy, Thin and Medium weights, plus the italics, should be rolling out pretty soon. At the same time some general refinements have been made to the existing weights. The result should be an even more functional and improved Muli Font family. Win / Win!
