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This article is from September 9, 2009, and is no longer current.

Georgia & Verdana Typefaces Families Evolving

Ascender Corporation, Carter & Cone, and The Font Bureau, Inc., announced that they are working on a project in conjunction with Microsoft to extend the Georgia and Verdana typeface families. This project began more than a year ago, and the first of the new typefaces are expected during the first quarter of 2010.
The Georgia and Verdana typeface families were originally commissioned by Microsoft to address the challenges of on-screen display. Designed by Matthew Carter and hinted for screen legibility by Ascender’s Tom Rickner, these fonts were initially released in 1996 with Microsoft’s Core fonts for the Web font pack, and then with the Internet Explorer 4.0 supplemental font pack.
Today the Georgia and Verdana typeface families are among the most widely used font families. Both Georgia and Verdana set the bar for screen legibility when it was needed most – when the Internet was experiencing an explosive period of growth. Their robust designs succeeded in reducing the chore of reading web content and email on-line and in small print.
Each family features large x-heights, open counters, high contrast between the regular & bold weights, ample spacing, and designs that help distinguish commonly confused letterforms. The fonts were programmed with extensive TrueType hints for improved rendering at small and large sizes in Microsoft Windows, and were developed with support for the WGL Pan-European character set.
The Ascender, Carter & Cone and Font Bureau project intends to optimize the Verdana and Georgia fonts for many new applications, including extended text formatting on websites and in print. The Georgia/Verdana project will provide a variety of enhancements to these fonts including:
* New weights and widths beyond the original four fonts in each family
* Extensions to the character sets
* Extensions to the kerning
* OpenType typographic features for enhanced typography

“The expanded and enhanced Georgia and Verdana families will appeal to many who publish in print and online,” said David Berlow, co-founder of The Font Bureau. “This expansion adds breadth for creative professionals who rely on these two workhorse font families,” he added.
“Georgia and Verdana forged the path for on-screen reading,” said Ira Mirochnick, president of Ascender Corp. “The opportunity to put together a design and development team consisting of Matthew Carter, David Berlow, Steve Matteson and Tom Rickner to expand and enhance these special fonts is unprecedented. Their work will provide everyone from users of Microsoft Office to professional designers with an exciting set of additional fonts that we believe will make Georgia and Verdana even more widely used than they are today.”

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