An amazing project from Google named Noto. The name Noto stands for No Tofu and is named as such because of those little boxes you are used to seeing on foreign language websites because your browsers can't decipher what it is.
So now after 5 years of hard work Google has launched Noto. In the video the engineers discuss the
scope of a project so big that you have to let the whole process play itself out knowing that it won't be done tomorrow or next year but years from now. A long term play to make a difference similar to Jamie Dimons vision on building sustainable banking systems in Africa that I blogged about and similar to the Chan Zuckerberg initiative to solve all current diseases in our childrens lifetime.
Languages that they had to ask for help with from internal staff was Malayalam and Telugu and Cherokee was a language that they could not find in house experts to help review the fonts for so they had to find friends of friends to solve the issues.
The idea was to have a unified set of scripts and then multiple weights (3300 characters per weight and then it grew geometrically from there). This project was a huge investment of time and was open source for all products that want to use these fonts. Currently the Sans Serif family is just now about done and the quality and design is something that was always kept in mind during the project. Nobody else has done this before with over 100 writing systems and more than 100 languages in place.
For more information check out #googlenoto or watch this Vimeo video: https://vimeo.com/185700918
So now after 5 years of hard work Google has launched Noto. In the video the engineers discuss the
scope of a project so big that you have to let the whole process play itself out knowing that it won't be done tomorrow or next year but years from now. A long term play to make a difference similar to Jamie Dimons vision on building sustainable banking systems in Africa that I blogged about and similar to the Chan Zuckerberg initiative to solve all current diseases in our childrens lifetime.
Languages that they had to ask for help with from internal staff was Malayalam and Telugu and Cherokee was a language that they could not find in house experts to help review the fonts for so they had to find friends of friends to solve the issues.
The idea was to have a unified set of scripts and then multiple weights (3300 characters per weight and then it grew geometrically from there). This project was a huge investment of time and was open source for all products that want to use these fonts. Currently the Sans Serif family is just now about done and the quality and design is something that was always kept in mind during the project. Nobody else has done this before with over 100 writing systems and more than 100 languages in place.
For more information check out #googlenoto or watch this Vimeo video: https://vimeo.com/185700918
