Verdana condensed looks pretty good.

It would certainly be great to have weights
between the Regular and its so-called Bold.

hhp

Well, that's not a Bold, that's a Black! Anyway I do think a
Demi can be very useful even in a system with a modest Bold.

hhp

BTW David, why was one given to you and the other to Steve?

> Who needs all these weights and widths for lo-res screens?

Anti-aliasing.
MacOS for one forces it on you (although in crappy quality).

> Quantity is the new quality.

That's sort of true.
Often character coverage trumps basic quality these days.

hhp

Quantity is the new quality.

If only half of designers pay for fonts we might as well sell twice as many to make up the difference!

> It would certainly be great to have weights between the Regular and its so-called Bold.

Hrant, did you even look at that waterfall graphic accompanying the linked article? There’s a very nice Semibold right between the two.

> The step from regular to Bold in Verdana prime was tailored for low res.

Well yes, I know that.
That's what made the "Bold" in effect a Black, which
makes it great that you added a real Bold in between.

Kent: Yes, I certainly did look - but maybe I was unclear
before; when I said "that's not a Bold, that's a Black" I was
talking about the original Verdana.

hhp

The article says they are being tweaked for print also. But at this point, Verdana is so overused (on the web of course), I'm not sure many would want to get the Pro version. Maybe in another 20years, if computers come with larger font libraries and the embedded fonts take off on the web.

Interesting to know the same dude did Georgia and Tahoma. I've always felt Tahoma was a cross between Verdana and Arial, or basically a tighter Verdana with less letter spacing.

I'm waiting for a pro version of Trebuchet.

I think:
- Almost always a weight between a Regular and Bold is great.
- Some Bolds are so dark two would be nice. What to name them? Well, the Bold should be called Black, then you'd have naming room for the others!
- Verdana is borderline.

hhp

I guess I think its overused, because I never use Arial for the sites I make.

Verdana is a great font for use on screen. But in print it just looks like a font that's made for use on screen. Same with Nokia font, one or two pixels narrower. It's just hard to make type to fit in a grid.

Ask Philippe Grandjean and the grid of 2304.

Verdana condensed black FTW!

> I'm left wondering exactly what the purpose of Verdana Pro is. It seems to very much be a reworking. It's a new family based upon and strongly resembling the old.

It is a reworking. It’s not a “new” family; it’s an expanded family. Not “strongly resembling” the old, built upon the old.

As far as I can tell, the four original styles remain essentially unchanged (weight, proportion, shape) except for the addition of glyphs, kerning, and OT features.

Much of the intention is outlined in Ascender’s press release announcing the project (you may need to filter the PR-speak):
http://www.ascendercorp.com/pr/2009-09-08/

(Incidentally, the expansion was undertaken in advance of the Ikea flap. That news story just prompted the announcement, not the development.)

Answers to your other questions will probably have to wait. I’m not involved in the brief or the development or the licensing. I’m just privy to Betas in order to develop specimens for FB.

@kent,

Thanks for the explanation of what, it seems, Verdana Pro is. What it eventually does, we'll see, I guess. (I don't think I'll be springing for it, just to compare.)

@davidberlow

Brand extensions almost never work out. If anything, they almost always end up diluting the brand image of the original in the minds of users.
At least that what I think Ché Guevara would have said.

@jh

Au contraire. There was no brand extension, they just introduced in a new locale. True, it didn't do too well, but it sold more Ché posters than ever before. And look what it did for Mandy Patinkin's career just a few years later!
Political failure, followed by commercial success on Broadway. Go figure.
(I could try to run with a comic setup like that, but let's let it go...)

There is an interesting piece on the Harvard Business Review blog that I think may hold some insights for the business of fonts in the years to come:
The iTunes Effect and the Future of Content
And it relates to the discussion about weights on this thread.
Mark Jamra of Type Culture and I were talking at TypeCon. A couple of months before that I had bought a single weight of a particular font from Type Culture. He told me that it piqued his curiosity because it was unusual. The usual thing was for somebody to buy a complete family.
Now, I'm basically interested in using fonts within browsers, so what the heck am I going to do with all those weights? Hell, with some fonts, I even like the browser-synthesized italic better than I do the created one.
Anyway, as time goes on, expect to sell more singles and less albums. Seems to be a trend.

rich

Regarding the price I think it's reasonable. Isn't a Font Bureau font usually selling for $40? Well 20*40=800. The prices announced here for the whole family are still a considerable discount, consistent with Font Bureau pricing. Thing is, even if they made the whole package for $80 no one is gonna buy it unless they need it! You don't go below a certain price. That will only lower the value of the product, that's a golden rule in retail :D

I think it makes perfect sense to be expanding the Classic Internet Headline Typefaces now that services like Typekit are about to take off.
About to! A big problem is still the fact that most computers connected to the internet don't have an effective anti-aliasing engine (i.e. Windows XP: Although ClearType (Microsoft's Anti-Aliasing) can be voluntarily turned on and will make Headline typography look considerably nicer, you get things like radio buttons malfunctioning and other bugs) but I think that under the rough condition of aliased type, Verdana Condensed is likely to look less ugly than FF Dax or other 'print typefaces'. This is why that's a great time to be releasing this type family.

David Said:
The issue is, that there is no label in InDEsign for what the default figures actually are, the user will have to know.
That should be okay this is the case for all fonts right now, isn't it?

>Thing is, even if they made the whole package for $80 no one is gonna buy it unless they need it!

Wow, now there's a concept.

>That should be okay this is the case for all fonts right now, isn't it?

Ya, but I'm a big fan of "okay is not OK." There should be some way of indicating to the user what kind of figures the defaults are.

>Oh, and: what about the hinting now, and the screen rendering?

Verdanas place as a good rendering screen font is not dependent on hinting, (thank goodness).

Cheers!

Plus Tahoma came first.

hhp

@johnnydib

I think it makes perfect sense to be expanding the Classic Internet Headline Typefaces now that services like Typekit are about to take off.

Don't know what "take off" means. But I'm not getting the relevancy. Is this set going be offered through Typekit?

Hmmm...bold, semi, and light look really tasty! Wonder how much just those three will cost eventually.

So Trebuchet has much heavier hinting than the others?

hhp

Hrant observed that Treb bold is less bold than Verdana bold. However it sticks with two pixel stems through the same range of text sizes.

My 'splantion was a guess. Vinnie would be the best person to ask.