Creation of Font Families - Essay Example

BITSTREAM Name Course Tutor Institution Date Bitstream Inc. The art of making languages visible has existed for a long time in history (Walker 2001). It is the technique and methods of arranging or designing the letters that keep advancing with time (Bachfischer & Robertson 2007; Bringhurst 2001). Various foundries or companies that deal with the development and release of fonts are available in the market (Brownie 2007). This report focuses on Bitstream Inc. which is known for the creation of the Vera font family and other fonts like the Swiss font family. History Bitstream Inc. is considered the first independent digital typeface company and has a library of classic fonts. Until its acquisition by Monotype Imaging Inc. in March 19, 2012, Bitstream has developed itself as a producer of digital fonts (Bitstream). The company belongs to the type foundry and mobile phone web browsers industry. The company’s owns the web domain www.bitstream.com for relaying its profile and merchandise. Bitstream is situated in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Amos Kaminski is the chairman and interim CEO. The firm has a total number of 148 employees and the employee growth rate was measured at 52.6 percent by 2010 (Bitstream). The company was founded in 1981 by a group of people, among them Matthew Carter and Mike Parker (Bitstream). Allegedly, Bitstream is among the oldest in the type foundry. Bitstream was highly involved in the BeOS; an operating system known for its high-level preoccupation in the BeOS. The original BeOS exemptions are now using an obsolete Bitstream renderer, while the newest up growth executions, from the start of 2001 have used Font Fusion. The operating system, involving its freeware launches included a tremendous sum of Bitstream fonts including the latter’s Times New Roman, Courier, and Helvetica clones. Bitstream Inc. acquired all the outstanding Type Solutions Inc.’s stock on December 2 1998. As a single company, Type Solution assisted Bitstream in the development of the Font Fusion engine, widely used in the rasterizing of Bitstream’s fonts. Additionally, Sampo Kaasila, the President and founder of Type Solutions, who also developed TrueType font technology, made an agreement to join the Bitstream team as Research and Development (R&D) Director. The R&D was needed especially for development efforts for the company’s type and technology products (Edgar 2012). Bitstream launched the open marketplace MyFonts in March 2000, which offers fonts from large and small foundries. In August 2000, Bitstream introduced a new Font Face Collection (NFC) program. The contemporary Bitstream Typeface Library has been a citadel of the allegorical design community for over two decades (MyFonts 2012). Bitstream took the chance in the market to introduce a novel assortment of font faces. This was not merely for increasing the number of fonts in the catalogue but also to invite designs from both upcoming and well-grooved designers. NFC was thus a platform to pursue these goals. Nevertheless, the NFC continues to establish itself on the perpetuating jobs of veteran and new designs and also seeks new couturier from all over the world (MyFonts 2012). According to Thangaraj (2004) typography and fonts have a connotative power suitable for corporate branding. In the first month of 2009, the company launched the BOLT Browser, which is a web browser for cell phones including smart phones and feature phones that can operate the Java ME appliances. Bitstream offers the BOLT Browser without charging to its consumers. The browser is created with the use of the firm’s phone web browsing hi tech known as the Thunderhawk. The technology is usually in use by Mobile network operators as well as handset manufacturers. Bitstream’s main competitors are Monotype, Objectif Lune, and Xerox. Bitstream recorded sales worth $23.1 million in the fiscal year ending December 2010, and a one year growth of 7.7 percent. The net income for Bitstream at this fiscal year was $3.2 million (Bitstream). Despite its success in release of fonts, Bitstream was pronounced defunct on March 19, 2012. Bitstream had a spinoff of its non-font businesses in order to facilitate the acquisition of the company. The company was acquired by Monotype Inc for $ 50 million. Monotype Imaging also specializes in typeface designing and typesetting for use with consumer electronic devices. Monotype Inc. has grown through acquisitions of various foundries, including recently, Bitstream (MyFonts 2012). What Bitstream does Bitstream is a company in the design and distribution of typefaces. It specializes in the typeface designs, and also text and imaging solutions for use with digital consumer devices or technologies (Information Gatekeepers n.d). Bitstream builds a collection of prototypal fonts, mostly under varying nomenclature for copyright consequences. Moreover, the organization itself has developed various fonts. Bitstream’s products include the freeware Bitstream Vera font family, Font Fusion, and Swiss 721 BT. The CorelDRAW software is widely utilized in the Bitstream font collection (Information Gatekeepers n.d). Apart from making its own fonts, Bitstream is also known for the production of the Font Fusion, which is an engine for rasterizing fonts. The engine was developed jointly by Bitstream and Type Solutions Inc. which was later owned by Bitstream (Information Gatekeepers n.d). Among the most recognized typefaces by Bitstream are the Swiss 721 BT, fundamentally a Helvetica duplicate involving compact rendition, and also a rounded rendition that is more related to the Comic Sans than the Swiss Family typeface. The Helvetica clone is among the premier digitally availed Swiss Family font that was created for the typographic objective in the year 1982 (Edgar 2012). Some of the popular fonts and font-related releases by Bitstream are:- Bitstream Cyberbit This is a commercial Unicode font available as freeware and used for non-commercial uses (Information Gatekeepers n.d). Historically, Bitstream Cyberbit is one of the original widely attainable typefaces that supported a big portion of the Unicode supply. Cyberbit was established to avail Unicode Consortium affiliates with a tremendous Unicode-cryptograph typeface to use for checking and goals of development. Currently, Cyberbit is neither offered as a free download nor a product of retail. The Bitstream Cyberbit typeface includes about 32, 910 characters, and 935 kerning pairs in v2.0 beta (Information Gatekeepers n.d). Vera Vera is a group of fonts with a free permit and closely based on Prima, another Bitstream’s typeface. Vera is a TrueType font with full instructions for hinting in order to enhance its rendering attribute on minimum resolution appliances such as computer monitors (Gettys 2010). The typeface has also been reorganized as a Type 1 PostScript typeface referred to as Bera for users of LaTex (Flynn 2005). Vera comprises of the Monospace, Serif, and Sans-Serif fonts in names such as Vera Sans, Vera Sans Mono, and Vera Serif, among others (Gettys 2010). Prima Prima is a series of fonts designed at Bitstream inc. by the in-house designers Jim Lyles and Sue Zafarana. Jim Lyles designed the Sans and Serif while Sue Zafarana designed the Sans Mono released in 1998. The Prima font face has been aligned to provide uniquely ample attribute at minimal screen resolutions. The Prima typefaces are thus necessary for prolonged use in browsers and other executable devices in which the viewers use the screen for long reading periods. Prima has a tremendous print outlook (My Fonts 2012). How Bitstream does its work Bitstream’s business depends on the fonts that it creates. The company uses the Font Fusion and Panorama technologies to deliver typographic capabilities to software, hardware, and other Web applications (Holdener 2008). Bitstream offers about 90,000 fonts through its marketplace MyFonts.com. Through the design of its BOLT Internet browser, the typography can be accessed on all kinds of mobile phones, especially the smart phones, or those supported by the Java ME application. The Bolt Internet browser is a cloud-powered, mobile-focused technology suited for this function; a backbone for Bitstream to deliver its services (Holdener 2008). Font Fusion Bitstream’s Font Fusion is a petite, quick, object-oriented font engine with the capability to render high quality text on any platform, device, and at any resolution (Information Gatekeepers n.d). Font Fusion’s entire source code is optimized, portable, and executes independent of the processor and operating system. The font engine is designed to render characters between 2,500 and 3,300 counts per second on a 100MIPS CPU (Information Gatekeepers n.d). Font Fusion is designed in a way that it can adhere to the memory and performance requirements in any kind of language, even those with many characters, such as the Asian languages. Font Fusion is the core technology behind majority of Bitstream’s products, myMMS, ThunderHawk, and Panorama (Holdener 2008). Panorama Bitstream uses Panorama to render text in different worldwide languages. Panorama is a text composition and line layout engine that uses Font Fusion as the base to render the text (Holdener 2008). The Panorama engine allows the user to manage various aspects of formatting the text, such as alignment, spacing, style effects-embossed, bold, outline, and shadows among others. Panorama especially provides support for the OpenType font tables which leads to automatic substitution of character for swashes, scientific figures, ligatures, and the like (Holdener 2008). Panorama also supports three anti-aliasing modes namely gray scale, monochrome, and vertically and horizontally optimized LCD. Font Fusion and Panorama technologies have been designed for use in printers, interactive TV and set-top boxes, mobile and handheld devices, embedded systems, and other applications requiring critical font size and character generation performance (MyFonts 2012). Typographers that have designed for Bitstream Bitstream’s success can be attributed to some important typographers that have designed for the company. Mike Russell Parker Parker was born in London but moved to the United States in 1942, and is known as an American typographer and type designer (Collen 2012). Parker is a co-founder of Bitstream Inc. together with another typographer-Matthew Carter in 1981. Parker and Carter saw Bitstream through its success in the 1980s when digital design and production, personal computer use, and desktop publishing became widely demanded in the Western world. As a renowned typographer, Parker featured in the documentary film Helvetica which is about typography, graphic design, and generally, the visual culture at global level. Parker was also given the Lifetime Achievement Medal of New York’s Type Designers Club in April 6, 2011. This award recognizes individuals in the typographic and graphic design communities that have excelled in the typography career, whether in type usage or typeface design. Parker designed for Bitstream between the years 1981 and 1987 (Collen 2012). Matthew Carter Carter, a co-founder of Bitstream with Parker, is responsible for some of the most popular typefaces such as Verdana, Georgia, and Tahoma (Collen 2012). Other fonts designed by Carter include Bitstream Charter, Helvetica, Mantinia, Nina, Miller, Olympian, Sophia, Shelley, New Century Schoolbool, Alisal, Auriol, Cascade Script, Bell Centennial, Cochin, ITC Galliard, Snell Roundhand, Big Caslon, and Gando. Matthew Carter was trained in the traditional disciplines of typefounding and spent a year studying type foundry in Holland when he was just nineteen. Carter is also credited for reviving some certain fonts that had dropped from popularity. Carter has worked for major organizations using his typefaces such as Time Magazine, the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Boston Globe. Carter has been awarded the Type Director’s club medal for fundamental contributions to the art, craft, and life of typography. He has also received the AIGA medal and Chrysler Awards for design innovation (Collen 2012). Jim Lyles Jim Lyles is a typographer from the U.S and also the in-house designer and font engineer at Bitstream. Lyles is credited with designing Bitstream’s Vera and Prima typefaces (Gettys 2010; My Fonts, 2012). John Baskerville Bakerville is an English typographer recognized as a transformer in the English printing and typefounding in his later years. Baskerville has designed various fonts of which Bitstream bought the rights to the typefaces (Edgar 2012). These include Baskerville No.2, TS Baskerville, TS Old Baskerville, and ITC New Baskerville (My Fonts 2012). There are several other typographers who have designed for Bitstream and these include:-Sue Zafarana, Holly Goldsmith, Chauncey Griffith, Adrian Frutiger, Ray Cruz, Tom Carnase, Victor Caruso, Thomas Cleland, William Caslon I, Hans Hunziker, George Jones, Richard Lipton, Herb Lubalin, Sol Hess, Rudolf Koch, Jennifer Maestre, and Morris Benton, among many more others (MyFonts 2012). In conclusion, Bitstream has over two decades experience in production of high quality font solutions for unique, digital typographic requirements. The company’s services are available to all customers including developers and corporations. Bitstream has classic library of fonts including the Vera and Prima font faces. The Font Fusion and Panorama technologies have enabled technology enabling in font production at Bitstream. Many outstanding designers have designed for Bitstream Inc. and the type foundry is a modern influence to the current typography world. List of references; Bachfischer, G., & Robertson, T. 2007. Understanding influences of the typographic quality of text, Journal of Internet Commerce, vol. 6(2), pp.97-122 Bitstream Inc. www.bitstream.com Bringhurst, R. 2001. The elements of typographic style (version 2.4). New York: Hartley & Marks. Brownie, B. 2007. One form, many letters: Fluid and transient letterforms in screen-based typography artefacts, Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, vol. 1(2), pp. 1-14 Collen B. 2012. Six typefaces designed by Matthew Carter. Ezinearticles.com. Accessed March 29, 2012 from http://ezinearticles.com/?Six-Typefaces-Designed-by-Matthew-Carter&id=397207 Edgar. 2012. The first emerging markets: Bitstream Inc. Edgar Online Accessed April 20 2012 from http://sec.edgar-online.com/bitstream-inc/10-k-annualreport/2003/03/31/Section2.aspx Flynn, P. 2005. Typography. TUGboat, vol.26 (3), pp. 196-198 Gettys J. 2010.Bitstream: Vera Fonts-April 16, 2003. Gnome, Accessed online March 29, 2012 from http://www-old.gnome.org/fonts/ Holdener, A. 2008. Ajax: The definitive guide. NY: O'Reilly Media, Inc My Fonts. 2012. Bitstream. Accessed online March 29, 2012 from http://www.myfonts.com/foundry/Bitstream/ Information Gatekeepers, Inc, LexisNexis n.d. The mobile Internet. NY: Information Gatekeepers Inc. Thangaraj, J. Fascinating fonts: Is the power of typography a marketing myth? Prism 2 Walker, S. 2001. Typography and language in everyday life: prescriptions and practices. London, England: Language in Social Life Series Read More

 

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