Unbuntu open source font project

Following on from Bruno Maag's presentation on fonts and branding, I wanted to find out more about Dalton Maag's Unbuntu* open source font project.

Unbuntu is a free to use open source operating system developed by Canonical.  What sets Unbuntu apart from other open source projects is the aim of creating for the user a friendly and consistent experience from code to graphical user interface (GUI) to print.

Part of Canonical’s design philosophy is to ensure that users can use programs in their own language, so the font used for the operating system (OS) needed to work across a range of character sets including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin and is designed so it can be extended to include other languages including Chinese, Indian and Thai.

Establishing the nature of a font requires a structured design framework to inform each stage. The difference with this project was the involvement of the Open Source community throughout – essential to influence the process and confer a sense of ownership. The design process had to be completely transparent with a flow of information in both directions.

As a core part of the Unbuntu brand identity, the new typeface needed to embody the Unbuntu values of clarity, lightness and simplicity, so early in the design process Dalton Maag established that a humanist sans serif was the most appropriate look and feel for the font.

This decision was in part dictated by the required functionality of the OS; the need for the font to work on screen at small sizes meant avoiding anything too elaborate or too wide.

Humanist fonts have their roots in early round hand calligraphy, and are seen as friendly, warm and highly legible. The clean lines and large x-height of a sans serif help with on screen readability, print well and have a contemporary feel.

The initial concepts were designed using a small number of glyphs, but enough to be able to create test copy, and get a good idea of what the finished design would look and feel like. Beginning with the Latin, Dalton Maag started designing with the four letters, n o H O, and these glyphs helped to define a guide for around 80 percent of the remaining character set.  The distinctive shapes for the ‘n’ and ‘v’ and a slight curvature to the ascenders and descenders helped establish the overall personality of the font. These unique design features would be translated across all the character sets to ensure that the design was a complete and consistent family.

The final font design includes four weights from light to bold plus their italics, a monospace font and a condensed regular.

The italic versions were designed as true italics where the a,e,f and g have different shapes that add subtle emphasis and textural difference to the roman text.

The designers also needed to consider the spacing between letters, as this creates a natural rhythm in the text that helps the reader to read with ease and understand the message. Manual adjustments, including kerning pairs, were addressed to ensure that the finished look was aesthetically pleasing.
Cultural sensitivities and nuances also needed to be taken into account for the left to right reading Arabic and Hebrew fonts. Arabic glyphs are derived from one another, but change meaning with the addition of diacritics, whilst Hebrew letterforms have a squarer feel and ‘hang’ from the x-height rather then sitting on the baseline.

Dalton Maag’s engineering team then performed a complex process to ensure that the font rendered on screen correctly. This included a checking and verification process to make sure that it met TrueType specifications, the addition of Unicode system information to identify each glyph co-ordinated across all the font styles and weights, and extensive manual hinting to make the font appear faithfully at any resolution on any device.

Finally the fonts were tested in a number of different environments and applications to check that they behaved as intended before being released.

The final design is a beautiful example of typographic design. It gives shape to the Open Source philosophy of Ubuntu, whilst remaining functional and aesthetically pleasing.

Exhibited in the Design Museum, the Unbuntu font family is a practical example of how a the partnership between the Open Source community and professional type designers can use the power of design to produce something valuable for everyone to use.



*Unbuntu is named after the Southern African philosophy of ubuntu, which often is translated as “humanity towards others” or “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”.

‘I love Comic Sans’

And so to hear Bruno Maag speak at London Design Week’s Sound and Type lecture in the glamorous environs of the Soho Hotel Screening Room.

His opening statement, that he ‘loves Comic Sans’, drew a predictable hiss of outrage from the designers and typographers in audience, but the point Bruno made is that Comic Sans is completely appropriate for its original purpose, comic book style lettering for speech bubbles in the programs MS Bob and MovieMaker

Comic Sans has a characterful letterform that connects, perfect for supporting letter recognition in early learning (and useful for dyslexics too).

So how do you engage audiences visually and emotionally with your brand? What are the essential elements that make your brand unique? How do you create bespoke tools that set your brand apart?

The challenge presented to branding in the global marketplace is maintaining the brand look and feel across all touchpoints in all markets.

Think ‘international’, and designers reach for their tried and trusted sans serifs, but where’s the emotional connection in the international style?

Remember that the ‘modern’ typeface Helvetica was cut in the 1950’s (itself based on the grotesque faces of the late Victorian 1900’s), putting Helvetica well into middle-age.

Instead, make an informed choice of typeface, one that expresses your brand values and connects visually and emotionally with your audience, a typeface that can be placed right at the heart of your brand.

Global companies, such as HP, see investment in a bespoke typeface as a key part of supporting their brand experience worldwide.

But relying on the Western European character set no longer cuts it. Fonts need to accommodate Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Indian and Thai characters.

Designing a font for the Chinese market means creating 27,500 glyphs alone and can take up to two years.

And that’s before you take into account Hong Kong and Taiwanese Chinese.

Font design is a major investment, but the recognition value that an appropriate font brings to a brand makes it arguably worthwhile.

Just don’t use Comic Sans unless you’re designing a comic.

The Big Draw 2012

At the V&A for The Big Draw, I attended one of the seminars given by Heatherwick Studios.

The main theme was about the importance of sketching in order to structure your design thinking.

Guggenheim Bilbao - Frank Gehry

Quick sketches made with your client on site are a great visual shorthand that can be developed later in the studio. The challenge is to keep the energy of those initial sketches as the design goes through various iterations and refinement on drawing boards, computer and CAD systems.

Sketching elevations and floorplans, page layouts or wireframes conveys much information that would be lost if the same information was provided as a narrative. Sketches are easier for both the layman and expert to interpret and so understand the vision of the designer.

East Beach Cafe - Heatherwick Studio

And with the increasing number of competitions and awards that require a story arc, anecdotally, many designers are going back at the end of a project to retrospectively create that all important ‘back of the napkin’ sketch that inspired the project in the first place (with apologies to Renzo Piano).

The Shard - Renzo Piano

Now, where did I put my pencil…

Olympic User Experience and Design

A great piece from the BBC's Nick Haley on the design thinking that has gone into delivering the BBC Olympic project across desktop, tablet, mobile and connected TV.

18 months in development, the design needed to accommodate the core sports audience as well as those who only become interested at big sporting events. The content structure builds on the design language already established by the BBC's UX team, but adds extra layers of detail as you drill down.

Extensive user testing was used to help the BBC team understand how people wanted to interact with the Olympics and to refine the placing of key information.

Illustrated with some initial post-it note sitemaps development sketches, this is a great case study for students of UX design.

camelCase

I’m seeing a lot of camelCase word structures at the moment.

camelCase, also known as ‘medial capitals’ in the OED, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the words are joined without spaces.

The practice is known by many other names, the most common of which is Pascal case for upper camel case.

In UpperCamelCase, each element’s initial letter is capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper case – as in ‘BlackRock’, ‘MasterCard’ or ‘PowerPoint’, or left as lower camelCase – as in easyJet’ or ‘iPod’.

An early systematic use of medial capitals is the standard notation for chemical formulae, such as NaCl (Sodium Chloride), that has been widely used since the 19th century.

In the 1970s, medial capitals became an alternative (and often standard) identifier naming convention for several programming languages.

Computer programmers often need to write descriptive (hence multi-word) identifiers, like ‘end of file’ or ‘char table’, in order to improve the readability of their code.

It was only in the late 1960s that the widespread adoption of the ASCII character set made both lower case and the underscore character ‘_’ universally available. Some languages, notably C, promptly adopted underscores as word separators (‘end_of_file’) however, some languages and programmers chose to avoid underscores, among other reasons to prevent confusing them with whitespace, and adopted camel case instead (‘endOfFile’).

One theory for the origin of the camelCase convention holds that C programmers and hackers simply found it more convenient than the standard underscore-based style.

Another account claims that the camelCase style first became popular at Xerox PARC. The PARC Mesa Language Manual (1979) included a coding standard with specific rules for Upper- and lower camelCase that was strictly followed by the Mesa libraries and the Alto operating system.

Since the 1980s, it has become increasingly fashionable in marketing for names of technology products (BlackBerry, YouTube), merged companies (PricewaterhouseCoopers, ExxonMobile, GlaxoSmithkline) and for naming your avatar in online gaming (SpongeBobSquarePants anyone?). However, camelCase is rarely used in formal written English and most style guides recommend against its use.

iPhone screen layout

In developing smartphone screen interfaces, the challenge is to fit the core feature set into the vertical screen area. Make the buttons too big and you need to lose some content. Too small and the interface is frustrating to use. But if size matters, how small is too small?

In the case of the iPhone screen (480x320 pixels), the structure of the vertical interface is established using a 44 pixel grid. This establishes the minimum size for a tap target on an iPhone, like a button or a list item, at 44 pixels – about the size of a fingertip touching the screen. By building the standard controls in proportion to that measure, apps can be developed for handheld devices that are actually built for hands, using finger-sized units.

That doesn’t mean that the button graphics have to be 44 pixels high. Instead, whilst a button graphic may be visually smaller, nominally within a 20x20 pixel box, the graphic sits within an active 44 pixel ‘tap area’ that extends beyond the button edges. That way, if touching slightly above and below, or to the left and right of a button, the tap is still registered by the button footprint.

At least one dimension of Apples’ standard controls always fits to this 44 pixel measurement. For example, although the QUERTY keyboard buttons are as narrow as 30 pixels, they still retain the 44 pixel height.

Rows of buttons are then fitted into multiples of 44 pixels. For example, the iPhone home screen organises buttons into rows 88 pixels deep.

Using multiples of 44 provides a natural rhythm in proportion to your fingers and helps establish the look and feel of your interface in harmony with other iPhone apps.

A periodic table of visualisation methods

© Ralph Lengler & Martin J Eppler

Like the London tube map, the periodic table is frequently used as a structure for classifying other collections.

This classification of visualisation methods works surprisingly well and displays some useful visual examples on rollover.