Open letter to Adobe
Three days ago, Andrei Herasimchuk, the well known ex-Adobe interface designer wrote an open letter to Adobe, posted on his blog, with regards to the poor state of typography on the web.
The gist of the letter is that Adobe, as a typographical leader, should release maybe eight to twelve core fonts into the public domain, so that they may be integrated into operating systems and other software, therefore making their availabilty nearly ubiquitous and allowing web designers to use them.
For Adobe, any consequences which may amount to a small loss of revenue from selling licenses to these fonts will be more than catered for by greater support of their actions by many designers around the world, who will, for the first time, be able to confidently use fonts other than the usual Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman and Verdana (most of them released by Microsoft in their Core Web Fonts package, since discontinued).
Talking of Microsoft, Jeff Croft has also replied to Andrei’s post, but this time urging Microsoft to distribute some of their newly-commissioned fonts Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel more widely. Currently, they are set to be shipped with Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. He also urges Apple to license these fonts from Microsoft and include them with Mac OS X.
Although I’m not a typography connoisseur or expert, I fully support both of these calls as I can see the immense benefits that it will bring to the web community at large. Having more than one or two fonts to reliably use will make every designer’s job so much easier and rewarding, and will make the web a much nicer and prettier place.