Category Archives: research projects

Collaborative type design in Adobe Creative Suite 6

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The new Adobe Devanagari

Some lettering trials by Tim Holloway, and a screenshot from tests to establish the dimensions for the deepest combinations in the Bold weight.

The new Creative Suite 6 will ship with a Devanagari typeface in two weights, designed collaboratively by Tim Holloway, Fiona Ross and John Hudson. The new typeface, first released in 2011, had to be legible in both screen and print in text-intensive documents, while addressing the challenges of the heavier weight and offering a distinctive, modern interpretation of the script. The typeface takes a new approach to a traditional script, achieving a dynamic, fluid style with open counters, delicately flaring strokes, and a rounded treatment of distinguishing elements.

This design approach is intended to counter the effect of repetitive verticals and horizontals prevalent in earlier typefaces. OpenType features and a character set of around 800 characters are employed to achieve a more sophisticated typographic texture, utilising alternative contextual forms, and regional variants.

More details and images on the Adobe Typblography blog.

Whether the weather

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Weather workings

Sue Walker sums up the day

Pictures from our latest AHRC-funded LUCID postgraduate workshop, Designing the Weather. Designers, meteorologists and psychologists worked together to consider how the design of weather forecasts could be improved to increase public understanding, in particular how forecasts could be designed to show the differing probabilities of forecast events.

Click here for a video account of the workshop and its outcomes, and read more on the LUCID Ning and CIDR web site.

Picturing social facts: Neurath workshop proceedings published

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During the Isotype Revisited project, Christopher Burke and Eric Kindel contributed to a workshop, ‘Picturing social facts: on Neurath’s visual language’, delivering papers alongside Friedrich Stadler, Elisabeth Nemeth, Sybilla Nikolow, Sophie Hochhäusl, Hadwig Kraeutler, Karl H. Müller & Armin Reautschnig, and Bart Lootsma. This was part of the 33rd International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, held in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, in August 2010.

The second volume of the symposium Proceedings have now been published, containing the workshop papers, as well as a series of papers on the theory and history of diagrams. Christopher Burke’s paper is titled ‘The linguistic status of Isotype’, and Eric Kindel’s ‘Reaching the people: Isotype beyond the West’. The volume, edited Richard Heinrich, Elisabeth Nemeth, Wolfram Pichler and David Wagner, can be previewed and purchased here.