Andrei's Open Letter to Adobe

Posted Aug 29, 2006 in Design and

Design By Fire’s Andrei Herasimchuk writes an open letter to Adobe to request the release of a set of core fonts to the general public for use in web browsers. I’d love to be able to specify Helvetica Neue for headlines and have a reasonable expectation that most users would see it, rather than a dingy knock-off like Arial.

2 comments so far

Comment by Ben Buchanan at 30 August, 12:00 am

That post needs the heartwarming tale removed ;)

The fonts nominated are not especially varied to the untrained eye – a lot of users won’t seriously notice the difference between them. Nor in fact will many users notice a difference between the nominated fonts and something like Arial.

I can also see that Apple and Microsoft might not automatically agree to distribute another corporation’s work, for free.

That said, designers could install these fonts on their own servers – all would not be lost.

Comment by Nick Caldwell at 30 August, 01:54 am

Users don’t always notice quality, not on a conscious level. But I think it does have a subtle impact.

Apple already pays quite a bit of money to distribute some of the fonts Andrei nominates as part of his wish-list. I don’t think they’d mind distributing some of them for free, at all.

I’d worry more about Microsoft going along with it, actually, given their own new forthcoming font families.

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