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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Antonio design is based very closely on the earlier Anton webfont. You may have seen Anton before, it’s that big bold font that Google used recently for their ‘For Everyone’ Chromebook adverts (above). Like Anton, Antonio has that same insanely large x-height and the same no-nonsense “i am a grotesk, what you gonna do about it?” stance, but Antonio is also a slightly refined version of what Anton is, and for this first release will come in three weights; light, regular and bold. It will be appearing on the Google Webfont servers very soon.

There’s more about Antonio and Anton here.

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Bottom line: 100% Free, to allow any commercial or non-commercial use. 100% Open, to allow alteration, modification and expansion.

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Slowly but surely getting somewhere. The following screenshots are from
Kubuntu 12.10 using sub-pixel rendering and full hinting. These shots show
the Regular and Bold weights of Oxygen Sans.

The latest in-progress fonts can be pulled from the KDE project page for Oxygen Sans.

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Anton is one of the popular webfonts available from Google’s webfont service. When first created Anton was released as a single weighted, heavy, display font, specifically made for use in web headlines and banners. The Anton face is now being developed and defined further, with more weights being added and made available under the name ‘Antonio’. Like Anton, Antonio will be available from Google Web Fonts.

The Origins of the Antonio Face.

Anton and Antonio take their basic type forms from a number of old display typefaces, most specifically from original specimens of ‘Anzeigen Grotesk’, a heavy, display, advertising typeface, first marketed in 1943 by the Haas Type Foundry, Basel. The design of Anton and Antonio take these old forms as foundations from which to build new webfonts. Other old faces in the same type family tree as Anzeigen were also used a points of reference for these new web fonts.

Historically, Anzeigen likely formed the basis for other more known and popular typefaces such as Compacta (1963), Impact (1965), Folio (1957), and Helvetica Inserat (1957). Equally, Anzeigen itself owed much of its design from the earlier face of ‘Aurora Bold Condensed’ and to a certain extent from condensed versions of the classic grotesques and gothic faces such as ‘Alternate Gothic’.

The ‘Advertisers Gothic’ Family Tree.

Plotting the family tree of the array of ‘advertising’ type designs and their origins and offshoots can be complex. In the era of machine typesetting, fonts were proprietary to the typesetting equipment, so for the manufactures of this equipment the typefaces manufactured was crucial to machine sales. As a result, every typesetting equipment manufacturer developed functional equivalents of important typefaces in their competitors’ catalogue (1). Alongside this smaller foundries also wished to sell their own version of the popular ‘faces’. A popular and industrious face such as the heavy, condensed, advertising or display gothic became highly copied and derived as each foundry manufactured and marketed it’s own versions. This created an array of typefaces that included very similar type forms. With the introduction of photo-typesetting and later, digital type, the array of these faces has grown larger still.

Making Fonts Free.

The forms of the heavy, condensed, advertising gothics have been used and re-used, shaped and re-shaped for nearly a century, or more. What is new with Anton and Antonio is that these old forms are now used to create fonts that are free to be used across the web, without hindrance from proprietary licensing or paywalls.

(1) A history of CG Triumverate Inserat, from www.fonts.com

Aurora; Design date: 1928 (c.)

Anzeigen Grotesk; Designers: Haas Type Foundry; Design date: 1943 (c.)

Folio Condensed; Designers: Konrad F. Bauer, Walter Baum; Design date: 1957-62 (c.)

Helvetica Inserat; Designers: Edouard Hoffmann, Max Miedinger; Design date: 1957/1961

Compacta; Designers: Fred Lambert; Design date: 1963 (c.)

Impact; Designers: Geoffrey Lee; Design date: 1965 (c.)

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The design for ‘Koda’ is an old off-shoot from the Coda webfont, re-shaped with the RoundingUFO app, expanded a little and tweaked to create a new display webfont, see the glyph comparison below

Coda itself was an experiment in creating a very straightforward webfont built strictly to the pixel grids of small to medium sized texts on standard screen resolutions. The designs have been refined since the earliest experiments and ‘Koda’ is a further departure, but with the underlying structure still very close to the original.

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‘Marika’ started as a doodle from scans of the old Nebiolo face ‘Siena’. I hadn’t thought of ever creating a working webfont from my digitised doodle, as there was a Linotype / Monotype version of the design available, called ‘Siena Black’, published in 1991. There is also Ralph Unger’s version of the face, ‘Card Pro Black Italic’, published by ProFonts in 2006. There are also a number of lesser known ‘freeware’ versions of the face too. But it’s tempting to take the step from doodle towards actually creating a new, free webfont from this characteristic old face.

A webfont digitisation of ‘Siena’ will depart from the approach of these existing versions of the old ‘Siena’ and will look more like the sketches below. It makes sense to bring change to the old design; narrower characters, re-design glyphs, build an extended Latin character set, and create some display-savvy OpenType ligature sets. The aim should be a new display typeface at home on the shelves of your local Trader Joe’s.

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