Why and how I am making Merriweather

When I proposed the design of Merriweather to Google it was with the goal of creating a workhorse text typeface for the web. I wanted to make something as legible and pleasant to read as possible which meant adapting the design to screens and to as many web browsers and operating sytems as possible. I will write more about how the adaption is done in a later post. At the same time I was also keen to add something genuinely new to the styles we read everyday on screens. Text faces may look alike but the subtle differences in feeling are important to me. Considering that we are doing more and more reading on screens rather than paper I chose to do this by returning to a style that isn’t commonly available. I decided to evoke the familiar feeling of old book type.

Diagonal Stress

One of the features I use to give this flavour is diagonal stress. Note: Most ( but not all) type designed for screens uses a vertical stress. Managing diagonal stress is more complicated and time consuming than vertical stress in a type design. However diagonal stress is part of what makes old fashioned book type feel the way it does.

Historical Inspiration

Saying “book type” is a bit imprecise. Merriweather’s sources of inspiration are more specific than that. To begin with Merriweather tries when possible to keep the feeling found in 16th century French types such as Garamonds and Jannons and Elzevir types as well as Aldine 15th century Italian type.

Mixed into this is the need the type work at small sizes on screen which required the adoption of some the structural features of more modern and specifically screen type. Merriweather is therefore inspired by the methods used by much more contemporary designer including the types of Gerrard Unger, Steve Matteson, Paul Barnes & Christian Schwartz, Joshua Darden and Christoph Noordzij. These designers’ work showcases the process of simplifing, regularizing, and essentializing letter shapes in order to better perform a specific task.

Very large x-height

If you look at Merriweather one of the features that is likely to be most obvious is an very large x height. Merriweather’s x height is so large that when it is laser printed it looks almost comical to me. I don’t consider this a problem because Merriweather is not a hybrid design meant to perform equally well in both print and screen. Instead it is a font design for screen first and a print font as quite a distant second. I should note that it will be perfectly possible to make a seprate print version if anyone wants one later on.

No entasis

Merriweather uses purely vertical stems vs ones with entasis. This image shows the Capital letter “I” in Carol Twombly’s Trajan and Merriweather’s I. Notice how the stem bends gently inwards in Trajan. Merriweather uses a simpler shape which makes it cleaner looking at small sizes.

Compression

Merriweather also uses horizontal compression so it may look a little squeezed. This example shows the lowercase letter “o” from Minon Pro and Merriweather.

Other characteristics

Merriweather also uses low variation of letter widths, low contrast and heavy simple shapes for serifs and terminals. This sample compares Monotype Baskerville with Merriweather.

Open source considerations

Merriweather is an open source project. Because of this making sure extending the design or collaboration would be less difficult in the future if possible was definitely part of the point of the project. This is part of the reason for using relatively simple shapes in serifs, terminals and stems.

You can make Merriweather better.

You can make Merriweather better. And by better I mean better for you and what you want to use it for. There are two ways to do this:

# 1 Ask for what you want!
If you are Using Merrweather in something and it isn’t good enough in some way – Let me know! If you want a feature which isn’t provided yet, let me know! In many cases I will be able to do something about it. I would love to see what you are doing with it. Seeing your use will help me make the design of the font better too. Actually I would love to see anything anyone is doing with it! You don’t have to have a request.

# 2 Fund the feature/s you want!
The plan for Merriweather is typographically incomplete in some significant ways. For instance small caps, alternative number forms and letters for some Languages using Latin for are not yet funded by Google. There are also no plans for real superior numbers for academic and scientific use! I am absolutely open to adding these and other features to the project if they get funded. You or your company could fund the feature you want yourself. The mechanism for doing that is already in place: Just email me about the feature you want and I’ll let you know what it will cost and when I think it will be complete. I am also open to having features funded by multiple people perhaps via Kickstarter. Note too: Because it is a Libre font which is freely available it means that everybody benefits from the improvement! Funds can be sent to me by Paypal or by using Google’s pay mechanism on this page:

http://code.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Merriweather&subset=latin#download

Note: Google pay mechanism has been discontinued.

# 3 Beg Google
You could also ask Google to fund them directly – send me an email and I’ll forward it too Google! If you get enough people asking nicely – they might do it!

Merriweather is starting to get some use. :-)

Merriweather Usage Stats as of Jan 26, 2011

Merriweather is starting to get some use.

Update: Merriweather just broke 1.5 million uses a day. Will it stay like that? We shall see.

Big changes!

There have been some big changes for Merriweather in the the last week!

First, Merriweather’s financial sponsor (Google) have asked me make a sans serif companion to the serif family already underway. They also want to increase the number of weights& styles available from the usual four to eight. For the Roman or upright and the Italic there will now be a Light and a Black weight in addition to the Regular and the Bold . This is great news because it will make the family far more flexible and versatile.

Here is a full listing with the added styles in bold:

MW Serif Regular*
MW Serif Bold
MW Serif Italic
MW Serif Bold Italic

MW Serif Light
MW Serif Light italic
MW Serif Black
MW Serif Black Italic

—-

MW Sans Regular
MW Sans Italic
MW Sans Bold
MW Sans Bold Italic

MW Sans Light
MW Sans Light Itlaic
MW Sans Black
MW Sans BIack Italic

*Note: This one is posted to the Google Font Directory already but it will be replaced with a new improved version

Now that the next leg of financial support is coming this also means that the silence is ending and there will be far more postings here, on Flickr and on Twitter talking about and showing what is happening behind the scenes as the Merriweather project gets properly underway!

Unfortunately there is bad news as well. With the shift in focus there will be no Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic until sometime in 2012 at the very soonest.

In my next post I will explain how you can participate in making Merriweather better.

Merriweather is live

Merriweather is live!

http://code.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Merriweather&subset=latin

Note! There is nothing beyond auto hinting right now, so it is not going to look perfect on PCs until it is hinted by hand. But it will be! It will just take a little time.

Merriweather’s first release has been sent to Google

Merriweather’s first release has been sent to Google to go into the directory! This means you should be able to play with it fairly soon. This first font is the upright regular weight roman. January should bring an Italic, a Bold, and a Bold Italic.

What’s in it? It is a fairly substantial glyph set but does not cover all languages that use Latin letters yet. For example: English, French Spanish and German are all covered. Czech, Polish and many others are not – yet. Note, if you use a PC, this version of Merriweather has hinting, but I am not pleased with this first stab at manual hinting looks. I plan to update it later. I am pleased with is the way it renders in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on the Mac and in Ubuntu. Opera isn’t cooperating.

Screen captures of this beta as seen in a variety of different environments will be posted here and on Merriweather’s Flickr page soon.

I have started mulling over a Sans serif version to match. What do you think?

Here are some teaser images The darker oner is the mac screen capture and the lighter one is a PC rendering.

Welcome to the Merriweather font project’s blog

The purpose of this blog is to make it easy to find news about this font development project as well as to make it simple to provide feedback. There are also Twitter, and Flickr accounts.

Typographic Overview
Merriweather will be a workhorse text type family made specifically for screens. Print use not be a significant consideration in the design. Merriweather will be useful for Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek. The styles to be created include Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic. The font format offered will be TrueType flavored Opentype.

About the project
This font is being made available in the Google Font Directory. When it is ready you will be able to use it in the same way as the fonts being offered there now. It is likely that a beta release will be available first followed by improvements to the design over time.

The image used in the header gives a rough idea of what the font may look like. However it is early in the process. I expect a great deal of change. Later headers will continue to reflect the current state of the development of the font.

If there is interest, a separate version for print may also be developed. Similarly, coverage of additional scripts, enhanced script coverage, optical sizes and additional styles are possible.

Support for the project
This project is being supported by Google and like many of the fonts in the Google font directory will be offered with a Libre license. This will be either the Apache 2.0 License or the SIL Open Font License. Feel free to be in contact with questions, requests or to help support the project.