Cantarell beta release

A typeface design by Dave Crossland

The Cantarell typeface family was designed during my Masters study of Typeface Design in the Department of Typography at the University of Reading, England. All students' work is showcased at typefacedesign.org

My typeface is a contemporary Humanist sans serif designed for on-screen reading; in particular, reading web pages on an HTC Dream mobile phone.

This device runs Google Android and therefore has a web browser supporting the exciting new web fonts feature known as @font-face. As my very first typeface design, the typeface has many faults, yet it achieves the goal of improving readability on this device.

If the text on this page is sans serif — if it looks like Arial instead of Times New Roman — then you are reading with it now.

Each font file currently contains 391 glyphs, and fully support the following writing systems: Basic Latin, Western European, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Dutch and Afrikaans. To date, Pan African Latin has only 33% glyph coverage.

Since the design was tested mainly when displayed on-screen at small sizes, the printed output (especially of the bold and oblique) does not work well. I hope to publish a final release that is tuned to the needs of printing in the future.

This shortcoming highlights my motivation for undertaking a study of typeface design: I believe it is essential that when we use digital tools, our freedom to use, understand, modify and share these tools is respected. Otherwise, when the tool does not work in the way that we need, we will be unable to fix it.

These fonts were developed using only such software, mainly FontForge. Typeface designs are tools too, so therefore these font files are licensed in a way that respects your freedom — you are invited to extend them to meet your needs, such as to add the glyphs missing from your own writing systems, under the terms of the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1.

— Dave Crossland, 6th July 2009 (Licence switched from GNU GPL to SIL OFL in May 2010)

PDF Previews

Complete Character Sets

Example Documents

Web linking

To use these fonts on your website you may use a hosting service such as the Google Font Directory, or host them yourself.

Download

Download these fonts and use, modify and share them around:

Download now from Google Fonts

Comments are most welcome – dave@lab6.com

Remix!

Cantarell is now a part of the GNOME Project, and its sources are centrally located in the GNOME Git repository:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/cantarell-fonts/tree

The original Spiro source file is the master source, and from it the other files in the family were generated; the regular by converting the Spiro curves to PostScript cubic Bezier curves, and then to TrueType quadratic Bezier curves, and the others by performing bold and oblique machine-transformations with FontForge on the Bezier curve version. I will soon publish a "Reflection on Practice" document that will explain this process in detail.