Máirín Duffy

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Chemist

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week by mairin on November 25, 2009

Chemist is a handwriting-style font. One idea of a treatment that would work well with this font is using it for blockquotes in a print layout. The font was created by Cathy Davies as a memorial to her late father.

So, you want to package Chemist?

Sweet! You’re the bomb! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

Last week’s font

Last week’s font was Chunk Five by Meredith Mandel. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

1 comment

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Chunk

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week by mairin on November 18, 2009

Chunk is a fun slab serif decorative font that is useful for headlines and other creative treaments. The font was created by Meredith Mandel – check out Meredith’s Chunk type specimen poster for an idea of the type of treatments this font can shine in.

So, you want to package Chunk?

Fantastic! You rock! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

Last week’s font

Last week’s font was Comic Serif Pro by Hannes von Döhren. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

5 comments

Unpackaged Font of the Week: Comic Serif Pro

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week by mairin on November 10, 2009

Comic Serif Pro is another fun font – it’s a slab serif font useful for headlines and other creative treaments – including comic books. :)

I actually found out about the font from my ever-awesome fellow FOSS artist pal Ryan Lerch, who showed me a comic mockup he’d made using it. I contacted the creator, Hannes von Döhren, who very graciously not only agreed to relicense the font under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, he also similarly licensed the rest of his impressive set of free fonts under CC-BY-3.0. (If you enjoy them, please consider giving Hannes a PayPal contribution on his site or consider purchasing from his collection of beautiful non-free fonts to show your appreciation.)

So, you want to package HVD Comic Serif Pro?

Holy cow! You’re awesome! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

Last week’s font

Last week’s font was Sniglet by Haley Fiege. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

Unpackaged Font of the Week Posts

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8 comments

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Sniglet

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week by mairin on November 4, 2009

Sniglet is a fun rounded, sans-serif font useful for headlines and other creative treaments. The font was created by Haley Fiege, and it supports a full Latin character set including accent marks (Haley notes both Icelandic and French are supported.) (P.S. Haley’s got some other great fonts for sale on dafont.com that you might want to give a try if you like Sniglet!)

So, you want to package Sniglet?

Super! You’re totally kickin’! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

Last week’s font

Last week’s font was Bola by Pablo Caro. Edward (AKA tk009) has again stepped up as he did for Tiza and has already packaged it and submitted a font package review request for Bola. (Fedora wiki font request page.) Both the Tiza font package review request and the Bola font package review request are waiting on someone to review them, so if you’ve got the time and inclination, please help out!

Thanks again to Edward for helping Fedora expand our inclusion of all the awesome openly-licensed fonts out there!

(P.S. I had a bit of a WordPress malfunction (I am so accustomed to implicit apply but apparently in schedule changes WordPress requires an explicit apply action) so there was a 15 minute window today during which you may have gotten a little sneak preview of another font I may post about it the future. ;-) )

2 comments

Planet can be annoying.

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week by mairin on November 4, 2009

WordPress posted a draft a week early by accident. Planet will not forget unless I keep that post but erase the content.

So here I am replacing that post with random content to get the posted-too-early post off Planet. :)

5 comments

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Bola

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week by mairin on October 28, 2009

“Bola” means ball in Spanish, and it’s a pretty accurate name considering the ball-shaped letters of Bola, a chunky and geometric decorative font useful for headlines and other creative treatments. The font was created by Pablo Caro, who is the same creator of last week’s font, Tiza. It supports many accent marks in addition to the base ASCII set of characters. Bola is licensed under the Open Font License.

Bola to me has a bit of a 60’s vibe to it, although I could kind of see it being kind of disco-y as well. If you’re not into the retro thing, you can go the route I took in the type sample and go for robots.

So, you want to package Bola?

Wonderful! You’re the bees’ knees! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

Last week’s font

Last week’s font was Tiza by Pablo Caro. The Fedora wiki font entry has been upgraded from the wishlist state to the in-progress state by Edward (AKA tk009), who has kindly taken a stab at packaging it. It’s still pending package review, so if you can help review it, we’d greatly appreciate it. Nice job, Edward!

4 comments

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Tiza

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week by mairin on October 21, 2009

Tiza is a bold, chalkily-distressed Western-style slab font useful for headlines and other creative treatments. The font was created by Pablo Caro. It supports many accent marks in addition to the base ASCII set of characters. As Pablo notes on the Tiza page, this font was actually used as a design element for the 2008 Teen Choice Awards website! Tiza is licensed under the Open Font License.

So, you want to package Tiza?

Fantastic! You rock! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

Last week’s font

Last week’s font was Anonymous Pro by Mark Simonson. The font has been upgraded from the wishlist state to the in-progress state by Robin Sonefors, and has already passed package review. Great work, Robin!

6 comments

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Anonymous Pro

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week by mairin on October 14, 2009

Anonymous Pro is a sans-serif monospaced font intended for use by programmers and in terminal applications. The character design takes special care to differentiate between commonly-confused characters such as O, 0, I, l, 1, ,, ., and so on. The font was created by Mark Simonson based off of some of his earlier work and the original bitmap font Anonymous by Susan Lesch and David Lamkins.

Note that Mark licensed Anonymous Pro under the Open Font License very recently – as in, last Friday! My friend Corey showed me Anonymous Pro 3 weeks ago now, and I really liked it but the license wasn’t right for Fedora, so I emailed Mark and he said he’d been considering another license anyway, and here we are. :) It never hurts to ask. If you see a font you like, but it’s under a freeware license that isn’t free & open source compatible, why not ask the font author to reconsider?

So, you want to package Anonymous Pro?

Fantastic! You rock! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

Last week’s font

Last week’s font was m plus by Morishita Coji. I’m happy to report that Igshaan Mesias has shown interest in getting m plus packaged for Fedora. The font request is currently in the “in-progress” state. Thanks Igshaan!

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7 comments

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: m+ fonts

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week by mairin on October 7, 2009

I’ve decided to try to feature one cool unpackaged-in-Fedora but freely-licensed font per week for the foreseeable future. There’s a couple of reasons I’d like to do this:

  • To simply keep up with the freely-licensed font options available, and share them for other designers’ benefit. Since I last did a review of freely-licensed fonts in September 2007, there has been a huge explosion of freely-licensed fonts, many of which are of a more impressive quality than ever available before. Whereas not so long ago in the past I could rattle off a handful of freely-licensed fonts I considered ‘good’ off the top of my head, these days it’s hard for me to keep up!
  • To inspire folks to get involved in packaging, specifically font packaging. Shameless begging font package requests via blog have worked in the past. I think it’s maybe a little overwhelming to look at the font SIG font wishlist and figure out which font to package. By highlighting one font at a time, I’m hoping to make it a little less overwhelming.

We are making awesome progress in expanding the number of fonts available in Fedora, by the way. This is thanks to the efforts of Nicolas Mailhot and the rest of the Fedora Fonts SIG and font packagers. If you want to help, join the cause, and maybe pick a font in these weekly highlights & try your hand at packaging it!

mplus fonts sample

The M+ fonts are a clean set of sans-serif fonts designed by Morishita Coji. They come in a nice range of weights, including normal, heavy, thin, ultra-thin, medium, bold, and ultra-bold.

Any takers for packaging m+ fonts? :)

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22 comments