Hi folks, On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 17:02 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote: > Firstly, I should have been more clear that I would like to see Droid > Sans be considered for the default UI font - not document font. > > I am not a typography expert. For my part, I think Droid looks a lot > better and it was designed from the start to be a UI font, where > DejaVu was not. > My designer colleagues in Fedora and GNOME are much more knowledgeable > about this and I've asked them to chime in with some details. I just wanted to chime in, although note my typographic background is limited to a half-semester typography course, multiple failed attempts at font design, and reading Ellen Lupton books, so your mileage may vary. That being said: I've always thought of DejaVu / Bitstream Vera as a slightly uglier clone of MS Verdana. Vera / Verdana - the names are similar. As to ugliness/awkwardness, see [1]. :) (they use Verdana - but open it up in Inkscape and type over to compare the two :) ) It appears to be fairly equivalent to Verdana for better viewing of webpages designed for verdana (a fairly ubiquitous font). They are both specifically designed for screen viewing - however Verdana was designed in the early-to-mid-90's (I'm guessing Vera was too) when the average screen resolution was probably 800x600 at best (today it's a pretty reasonable guess your worst resolution is 1024x600 on a netbook.) Droid Sans has a lot more personality than those two - to me it is a lot friendlier & less stiff. The letterforms are very humanist (human-hand/calligraphy-inspired.) It's a humanist sans-serif like Gill Sans - which I think gives it a warmer feel - little calligraphic touches like the g's bowled descender and the curved & tapered serifs & finials on the letters. Deja Vu is a colder font - like a Helvetica / transitional sans-serif - it is rather anonymous/neutral-looking and has far less line-width variation. Where Droid Sans has tapering and curves, Deja Vu has hard angles and straight-cuts. It might be worth starting a thread on typophile. ~m [1] http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/temp/Screenshot2.png -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
