On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
I noticed from Kaldari's notes [1] that "Open sans" was rejected based on language support and install base. I notice however that it is pretty popular on the web [2,3]. Can someone elaborate on these results as it is surprised me?
To me we can learn from this experience that install base (especially where Windows is concerned) is probably not such an important factor. The language support is more of an issue, but I wonder if this can be resolved by specific font stacks with more suitable open fonts is provided.
To improve install base we can easily iterate on this and start using web fonts in some form in the future.
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh/Font_choice#Body_font_eval... [2] http://www.typeandgrids.com/blog/the-ten-most-popular-web-fonts-of-2013 [3] http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/03/12/taking-a-second-look-at-free-font...
A similar example is Google's Noto font ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts). It has basically no default install base that I'm aware of, but it's focused on readability in as many scripts as possible and is Apache-licensed.