Coming Soon - FontAid IV ampersand font to aid Haiti

Coming soon - Font Aid IV: Coming Together, a Collaborative Typeface

The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) has announced the Font Aid IV project to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders to assist with their relief efforts in Haiti. Ascender has contributed to a typeface being developed for this effort. When the font is completed, hopefully next week sometime, it will be available from AscenderFonts.com and other type resellers. Chank Diesel is doing the heavy lifting on this project, and here is a sample of the work in progress.

Fonts for Tattoos

We are always interested with the many creative ways in which fonts are used. Tattoos represent a unique 'canvas' and the fonts used are often quite unique. This article on misspelled tattoos is quite humorous and something we thought you'd also enjoy. If this inspires you to go out and get a tattoo, we can definitely recommend Old English Text. -:)

New Verdana / Georgia fonts

Jay Nelson just posted this article about Verdana, and the new Verdana/Georgia fonts that Ascender is developing with Matthew Carter and The Font Bureau. You can read the article on the MacWorld website.

Happy Holidays from the Ascender Team

The entire Ascender team wishes you a very happy holiday season, and best wishes for a wonderful 2010!

Ascender talks type at RIT

Ascender's Steve Matteson and Tom Rickner recently took part in a panel discussion on type & typography at the RIT School of Print Media. Also on the panel was Michelle Hill of Microsoft and Charles Bigelow, the typography professor at RIT who helped organize the event. Read the full story.

New fonts in Microsoft Windows 7

The new Windows 7 ships with quite a few new fonts. How many? Read this article to find out!

Font licensing in the news

Here is a good story at Graphic Arts Online about font licensing, and the intrinsic value of fonts, by note author and pre-press consultant Brian P. Lawler. In the story he even quotes Ascender's Steve Matteson on the tireless behind-the-scenes work that goes into designing and developing high quality font software files. Read the story: Jaywalking on fonts

Verdana & Georgia font enhancements coming in 2010 !

Matthew Carter, the original designer of the Georgia and Verdana fonts, has teamed with Ascender Corp and The Font Bureau to develop new and improved versions of these popular font families. In an announcement made today by the companies, the Georgia and Verdana fonts will see new weights and styles added to the families, along with enhanced character sets and OpenType features. The project to develop these new fonts begin over a year ago, and the new fonts are expected sometime in the first quarter of 2010. Read the news release.

Verdana fonts in the news

Microsoft's Verdana font family was designed by Matthew Carter and hinted by Ascender's Tom Rickner. It is a sturdy, legible sans serif with an affable appearance. It is also very popular because it is commonly found on Mac & Windows systems and commonly used for formatting sans serif text in web pages. But when IKEA began using it in their print catalogs, people took notice and not everyone approved. Here is an article summarizing the attention and criticism in the New York Times.

EOT Lite - the right direction for web fonts right now

Ascender is offering web font licenses to our customers who want deploy rich typography on their websites. EOT Lite offers a solution for web designers today. Paul Irish wrote a summary of the various web font options, and concluded "I believe EOT-Lite is the right direction for webfonts right now."

Droid Sans Mono Pro - new bold weight now available

Ascender is pleased to announce another weight of the Droid font family. We have completed work on a "Pro" version of Droid Sans Mono Bold font containing OpenType features such as old style figures and a slashed zero. Droid Sans Pro Mono Bold font can be instantly downloaded from AscenderFonts.com

Using an automobile to make a font !

Type designers have a variety of tools they can use to create a font. Pencil/pen/brush and paper, or a desktop computer with font design tools are commonplace.

But what about using a car?

Here is an innovative promotion from Toyota in which they were able to digitize the paths driven by a stunt car driver to create letterforms and combine them into a digital font. You can read the story in Gizmodo.