fonts

What makes a great font for a smartphone? Aside from legibility, is it its simplicity, its brand recognition, or the way it influences people's feelings toward the product? From neutral and casual, to just plain wrong, we sit down with Steve Matteson, typeface designer extraordinaire, to get the lowdown on the typefaces featured in Windows Phone, Android, and iOS devices.

Segoe (UI) for Windows Phone: The beauty in neutrality Before Matteson, current creative director at Monotype Imaging, designed the typefaces featured on Android and Windows Phone devices, he created the aggressive lettering for Microsoft's Xbox (which was aimed … Read more

No one outside the font world will recognize Steve Matteson. No one on the street will ever stop him and ask for an autograph, despite the fact that his designs are seen by millions of people around the world.

If you ever used Windows Vista, read off a Barnes & Noble Nook, or played a game on an Xbox, Matteson's work has already reached your eyes. Open a Word document in your computer and pull down the font menu. He is there -- nestled in Andale Mono, Cambria, and Curlz.

But it is his contributions to two mobile phone … Read more

Monotype Imaging acquired the font business of rival Bitstream for about $50 million in cash, a move that gives it greater clout in the world of digital typography.

Through the acquisition, announced yesterday, Monotype Imaging gets Bitstream's typeface library, its MyFont site for browsing 89,000 fonts and licensing them for use on Web sites, the WhatTheFont service for identifying typefaces, its Font Fusion and Panorama software for font rendering and layout, and 10 patents. It's also hiring 50 Bitstream employees and taking over its research and development site in India.

The move gives Monotype Imaging more heft … Read more

When managing fonts in OS X, conflicts or faults in font files can result in a number of odd problems such as misaligned characters, garbled characters, and improper fonts being used when documents are displayed, converted, or printed. In addition, font problems can result in applications or even the system crashing or hanging.

These problems can happen if there are conflicts from old font files, duplicates of the same font file in different locations in the OS, or even missing fonts that ought to be installed and active in the system.

Generally font problems are not too common since most … Read more

Did you ever wish you could create cool 3D images of cars, landscapes, and anything else you can visualize, only to choke at the price of 3D modeling software? High-quality 3D design tools are finally available as freeware, such as ThreeDify Designer Free, a scaled-back freeware version of 3Dify Designer, which some users will remember as ActiveSolid. This capable 2D- and 3D-modeling and rendering application has two operational modes, as a standalone tool and as an ActiveX object in Internet Explorer, Excel, PowerPoint, and other programs. We tried its standalone mode.

ThreeDify Designer Free's user interface bears a strong … Read more

Choosing the proper font for a flier, title page, or even a graphic can be a difficult task. 

Sometimes the standard fonts installed on your operating system just don't cut it, and browsing free font Web sites can be a time sink with no guaranteed results. However, you may see or recall an image with a really awesome font, but have no way of contacting the artist to identify the font used. Here's a good way to identify fonts in images for free.

Step 1: Find a picture with the font you want identified. If the image … Read more

If you're looking to expand your font selections, Google's Web Fonts collection has you covered.

A lot of sites say they offer free fonts, but there's either a catch, or it's just a gathering of all the fonts that came standard on your computer. Google's Web Fonts hosts hundreds of fonts that you probably don't have, and lets you download them for free. Here's how to grab your favorites:

Step 1: Head to http://www.google.com/webfonts in your Web browser.

Step 2: Adjust the filters on the left side … Read more

Hoping to aid fancy typography on the Web, font powerhouse Monotype Imaging has released technology called MicroType Express (MTX) so it's free for public use, CNET has learned.

MTX is patented compression technology that shrinks font download sizes, hastening the moment when a person can see a Web page with its intended typography, but Monotype Imaging is releasing the technology under very liberal licensing terms. Microsoft licensed MTX for use in Internet Explorer, and now Monotype has won over another major browser maker, Google, the companies plan to announce today.

With its "make the Web faster" initiative, … Read more

The keyboard offers a number of common characters for the language layout you have chosen, especially when you use modifier keys such as Shift, Command, and Option to invoke alternative character sets; however, while those that are mapped to various keys are common, they are only a minor subset of the characters that are available for you to use when composing documents.

OS X's support for unicode fonts makes a vast array of characters available for you to use in applications that are coded with Apple's Cocoa frameworks, and while some programs have their own input methods for … Read more