Our refreshed logo
Today is Culture Freedom Day! Hurrah! To celebrate, we have launched our newly improved logo, which features an Open Font Licensed typeface. To celebrate even harder, we have interviewed the font’s designer: Please give a warm (digital) welcome to Marco, the designer of our new, favourite, and totally Open Source font!
Anna: How long have you been designing forts for and what other things do you design/do?
Marco: It has been a year since I started crafting fonts. I wanted to be able to use my own fonts with my own features, and this inspired me to work on the font. Also, the knowledge via challenges and learning I came across in the process were very rewarding.
Anna: How long does it take you to design a font?
Hans Kendrick Typeface 2.0 by Alfredo Marco Pradil
Marco: It takes me approximately 5 days (part-time) to design the glyphs and I think about 15-30 days with kerning and hinting. It was lot of time for Gen as I was an initiate/novice. But I have since made another font called Hans Kendrick 2.0 which took me less time as I have a basis for the common kerning pairs and spacings. Most of the time spend on the 15-30 days are all testing on print and online. Grueling indeed. If I were doing this full time them I will have finished a font weight in 3 days.
Anna: Which tools do you use for your design work, do you use much free/open source software?
Marco: I use Inkscape and then transfer the vectors to font forge. They are both free software. I use free software as I love the idea of open source. Every creative person should have access to these softwares and be able to contribute to the world, as opposed to the monopoly of the technology. I don’t speak against the designers out there as I also make a living by designing stuff.
Anna: Why did you use a Open Font License on this font?
Amelia: by Alfredo Marco Pradil
Marco: The font I am creating are not 48 weight family fonts or Mega-weight variants (just one or two weights, like bold and regular). I intend my fonts to be used as alternatives to great classic fonts. The great fonts are really expensive.
Anna: If you give away things for free then how do you earn your money?
Marco: I work as a designer for a multidisciplinary design consultancy and I don’t create fonts as a job. That is why I studied how to make fonts and provide them with an OFL as I faced the problem of getting purchasing expensive fonts.
Anna: So in your paid work you found you needed these fonts, but you make them in your spare time? Out of interest, does your “day job” support Free Software as much as you do?
Marco: Yes my job supports Free Software, though free doesn’t always mean good, so we just sift through the selection.
Alfredo Marco Pradil is a designer, Illustrator and artist. He studied Fine Arts majoring in Advertising Design at the College of Architecture and Fine Arts, Batangas State University (Philippines) and has worked as a designer since 2005. After working for a Japanese game developing company (Pixelstream Corp.), Advertising Agencies: Creatus Advertising & Design and The Marketing Boulevard, Marco is now a designer at Dubai based design agency, Creative Sauce. In January 2014 he added Gen Font to the Open Font Library: In May 2014 it became the official phpList font. Like what you see? Tweet Marco to tell him!