Manufactura Independente: Libre type design: breaking tradition and going new ways – LGM 2013
Channel: Libre Graphics Meeting
Date: 2014-08-10

Libre type design: breaking tradition and going new ways
Manufactura Independente, Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente
manufacturaindependente.org

This talk proposal follows on the issues surrounding libre type design that we began to explore at our last LGM talk, “The awesome things that libre web type enables you to do”. 
There is a premise that one must spend considerable amounts of time perfecting a typeface, with timeframes going from months to years. Besides the “creative” part of the work, there’s a significant amount of boring workhorse tasks: checking spacings, comparing glyphs, testing use cases. Another unwritten rule in conventional type design is that typefaces ought to be released only in a finished form. Because most traditional type design is, in one way or another, a commercial endeavour, there is little openness towards unfinished or speculative typeface development. 
No wonder, therefore, that thousands of unfinished typefaces sit inside dark corners of designers’ filesystems and notebooks, condemned to the most perverse kind of bitrot: “Someday I’ll finish it”. 
Manufactura Independente will go over how applying F/LOSS development principles can provide new paths out of this tired way of working. This will be accompanied by a set of practical examples gathered from the designers’ own experience with collaborative development and typeface design, including a first look at Manufactura’s latest project -- Oxshark Fontworks -- a proposal they’ve been developing to tackle the aforementioned issues.