TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Apr 15 05:50:44 EDT 2024

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

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ABOUT

Abattis [Dave Crossland]

Abattis is a free software type foundry launched in 2009 by Dave Crossland. Auto-description on his wiki: I'm a designer and nerd in Bournemouth, UK, and I do systems and network consultancy for a living. I completed a BA (Hons) Interaction Design degree at Ravensbourne College in 2006, and am currently on the MA Typeface Design course at Reading, from October 2007 to July 2009. My design philosophy centers around the parameterisation and automation of design to improve the design process, and some of my old ideas are published at designprocess.com. He is a proponent of open source code and of free fonts, and involves himself with dedication in the Open Font Library project. He defines Free fonts as follows: Free Fonts are about freedom, not price. They are fonts you are free to use for any purpose, fonts whose internals you are free to study, fonts you are free to improve, fonts you are free to redistribute, and fonts you are free to redistribute improved versions of which means - in the specific context of font software - fonts you are explicitly free to embedded, subset, bundle and derive from to create any kind of artwork. To be truly Free they must allow commercial use and even to be sold by anyone - as it is about freedom, not price.

Dave dreams of a free culture of visual communication around the world, so he decided to free fonts. His Masters Thesis written in 2008 at the University of Reading is entitled The Free Font Movement.

In 2009, for his MA work at Reading, he designed Cantarell, a free humanist sans family, done together with Jakub Steiner, free at CTAN, Github and Open Font Library. OFL page. Cantarell was there at the launch of Google Fonts and has become widespread. In 2010 it was selected as the default User Interface font for GNOME 3. Petra Sans (2017) is a further development of Cantarell by Cristiano Sobral. Irene Vlachou added Greek support for Cantarell in 2018. The current state of Cantarell as reported on Github: After the GNOME project adopted the typeface in November 2010, minor modifications and slight expansions were made to it over the years. Pooja Saxena initially worked on the typeface as a participant of the GNOME outreach program and later developed her own Devanagari typeface Cambay, which included a redesigned Latin version of Cantarell. It was backported to the GNOME branch of Cantarell by Nikolaus Waxweiler, who also performed other janitorial tasks on it. The overall quality of the design was however far from good, given that the regular and bold face were worked on seperately and without consistency and had low quality outlines, and the oblique variants were simply slanted uprights without much correction. The GNOME design team also requested lighter weights. Up to this point, the work on Cantarell was mainly done with libre tools such as FontForge. Given the decaying state of FontForge (arcane user interface, heaps of quirky and buggy behavior) and the very early development status of alternatives such as TruFont, Nikolaus Waxweiler started redrawing Cantarell in the proprietary and Mac-only Glyphs.app under mentorship from Jacques Le Bailly ("Baron von Fonthausen"). Later, Alexei Vanyashin and Eben Sorkin reviewed the design.

Finally, in 2009 or 2010, he started work on the Google Font Directory. Dave works as a typographic consultant to the Google Fonts project and gives financial support to libre type projects including FontForge, Glyphr Studio and Metapolator.

Klingspor link. Kernest link. Google Plus link. Font Squirrel link..

EXTERNAL LINKS
Abattis
Klingspor Museum page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Type personalities ⦿ David and Goliath ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ Type design in the United Kingdom ⦿ Open source fonts ⦿