Release Core Fonts
On Khoi Vinh’s site, Subtraction, one post ranked high on his list of things Elsewhere: an open letter to John Warnock written by Andrei Michael Herasimchuk at Design by Fire.
Andrei, with all due respect, invites Mr. Warnock of Adobe Systems to release a number of core fonts to the public domain to rescue the web from “the likes of Arial”. I would certainly welcome this possibility, as the limits of publishing on the web have moved some designers to adopt proprietary technologies, such as Flash, to overcome the dearth of high quality typefaces that are universally available for use on the web.
Arial Under Fire
Poor Arial gets little respect, even though the intention of the designers, Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, was never to replace Helvetica, but to provide a contemporary sans serif design for Apple Computer’s, at the time (1990), new TrueType font format.
While every PostScript printer generally ships with support for a core set of fonts, not every printer is a PostScript printer. Operating systems also ship with their own core set of fonts. Microsoft chose to bypass higher type licensing costs by commissioning their own fonts to ship with their Windows operating system, Arial being one of those fonts. Arial has since been the topic of much controversy because of the lack of copyright protection on type designs and what is considered the indiscriminate theft of designs through the proliferation of fonts that mimick or duplicate the original designs. Arial has come under fire for being one of these fonts.
MacUser published an article, Twenty/20 in their July 2005 edition, (available as a PDF file from www.fontwise.com) regarding the poor reputation of Arial, in effect coming to its defense as a legitimate and unique type design. The similarity in the widths of the glyphs does, however, raise suspicion as to Microsoft’s intention to replace Helvetica. More than likely, it is Microsoft’s mere involvement that raises the most suspicion.
A Presumption of Generosity
If we cannot presume upon the generosity of John Warnock I have wondered whether there may be a groundswell of support for the development of an opensource typeface design. Yet, I can’t imagine how designers would be able to agree on what might be the best design direction for such a project. Also, the likelyhood that designers would scramble to work on a project for which there would be no possibility for remuneration is slim to none.
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