Gerry Leonidas is an Associate Professor of Typography at the University of Reading, UK.

He spends his days talking and writing about typography, typeface design, and typographic education. He is the Program Director of the  MA Typeface Design program, and the Tdi summer course.

www.leonidas.org

A framework for typographic quality in typeface design

The growth of consciousness about typeface design has brought a rise in the numbers of aspiring typeface designers; that's a good thing. But the ease with which fonts can now be published online has resulted in the loss of a filter for quality that was in the past embedded in the publishing process. This observation is most evident in the case of non-Latin scripts, where the lack of widely available resources and clear pathways to excellence present a major hurdle to aspiring designers. This talk reports on a current research collaboration between Reading and Google to develop a framework for ensuring a minimum level of typeface and typographic quality that is publicly available, while being agnostic with regard to the design specifics of each typeface.