[OpenFontLibrary] Revival of the fittest

[Schrijver]

Great initiative Nathan

Originality: For professional type designers another reason to make original designs is that they are a way to differentiate yourself in a saturated market. But open source typefaces aren’t exactly a saturated market yet :)

I like the idea of revivals for open source type design. You can benefit from the mindshare of the font being revived. If you do a Didot or a Caslon or a Garamond or a etc. you make something people already know they need. If you make an original design you will have to convince everybody from scratch.

And to get started with collaboration might be more easy around something that’s part of a shared visual idiom, rather than personal vision.

here’s a nice Caslon:
http://www.archive.org/details/specimenofprinti00casl 

I agree also an oldstyle would be very nice. I got a specimen of Raph’s page last year for a type by Mardersteig, started cutting up the specimen into glyphs. It was designed I think before WOII, so should be OK no?
put it up:
http://github.com/codingisacopingstrategy/open-oldstyle

cheers
E


Op 25 jun 2010, om 01:51 heeft Dave Crossland het volgende geschreven:

> On 25 June 2010 00:28, Alexandre Prokoudine
> <alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 6/25/10, Dave Crossland wrote:
>> 
>>> I wonder why you choose to work on a revival instead of an original
>>> design in a specific genre, though? That seems more fun to me,
>>> personally :-)
>> 
>> It's quite an interesting comment from someone with Reading background
>> :) First stage of doing art has always been studying and copying
>> other's work.
> 
> Sure, I mean that making a revival isn't as fun as taking a model from
> history and reworking it into an original design.
> 
>> Speaking of preferences, there seems to be a demand for an open source Jenson.
> 
> +1 :)