[OpenFontLibrary] New Ubuntu Font

[Dave Crossland]

Hi,

The new Ubuntu branding includes a new font.
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/308 says:

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A new Ubuntu font

We have commissioned a new font to be developed both for the logo’s of
Ubuntu and Canonical, and for use in the interface. The font will be
called Ubuntu, and will be a modern humanist font that is optimised
for screen legibility. It will be published under an open font
license, and considered part of the trade dress of Ubuntu, which will
limit its relevance for software interfaces outside of Ubuntu but
leave it free for use across the web and in printed documents.

It will take a few months for the font to be finalised, initial
elements will be final in the next week which will be sufficient for
the logo and other bits and pieces, but I expect to see that font
widely used in 10.10. The work has been commissioned from
world-renowned fontographers Dalton Maag, who have expressed
excitement at the opportunity to publish an open font and also a font
that they know will be used daily by millions of people.

Initial coverage will be Western, Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic
character sets, but over time we may be able to extend that to being a
full Unicode font, with great kerning and hinting for print and screen
usage globally.  We are considering an internship program, to support
aspiring fontographers from all corners of the world to visit London
and work with Dalton Maag to extend the font to their own regional
glyph set.

The critical test of the font is screen efficiency and legibility, and
its character and personality are secondary to its fitness for that
purpose. Nevertheless, our hope is that the font has a look that is
elegant and expresses the full set of values for both Canonical and
Ubuntu: adroitness, accountability, precision, reliability, freedom
and collaboration. We’ll publish more as soon as we have it.

A good start

It’s been an exciting process, but I have the sense that we are just
getting started. The language will get richer, we will find new things
that we want to communicate, and new treatments and visual themes that
resonate well with these starting points. We’ll find new ways to
integrate this on the web, and on the desktop (look out for the two
new themes, Radiance and Ambiance).  I hope we’ll see the language
being used to good effect across everything we do, both commercial and
community oriented. There’s a range of expression here that should be
useful to artists across the spectrum. Let me know how it works for
you.

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"We are considering an internship program, to support aspiring
fontographers from all corners of the world to visit London and work
with Dalton Maag to extend the font to their own regional glyph set."
is very cool.

-- 
Regards,
Dave