We’ve been talking a lot about themes, skins and icons.
But what about fonts?
Shouldn’t we have our own font as a brand for Haiku?
I’m still working at this:
http://www40.brinkster.com/dylansmrjones/fonts.html
The pictures shown are thumbnails of the images used in fontforge, so the quality is a bit low, but it should give a reasonable clue about the final look, or at least a clue about the design elements I’ve chosen.
Constructive feedback is welcome 
I’ve been hoping someone would step forward for a distinctive Haiku-type of font. Stubear did the original logo in Futura Bold. Perhaps you could do something which closely resembles that style?
I can take a look at it, and see if I can use some of the same design elements without getting too close to Futura (copyright issues).
However, it looks more like Futura Medium to me than Futura Bold, but I’m probably wrong 
Unfortunately I lost all my vector files so I have a bit of work to do to recreate those (but at least I have the png’s I prepared for Fontforge) :roll:
A pre-0.1 version (which will have full ANSI support) should be ready about New Year (fonts take a lot of time to make, surprised me the first time)
Can’t we use Swis?
Can't we use Swis? ;)
Swiz what? There are many fonts named after Switzerland … even I’m naming my font after Switzerland (just in Italian instead of latin or english )
Can't we use Swis? ;)
In my eyes most of these Helvetica “rip offs” are pretty much disgusting to look at, despite the fact, they’re well hinted.
Helvetica and Arial and fonts very similar are just plain old boring.
My Svizzera font is a bit better, because it has several design elements which removes it quite a bit from the mentioned fonts. None the less it has a rather mechanical and technical look. Futura is a lot more beautiful, and a Futura stylish font would definitely brand Haiku as a beautiful desktop OS.
Don’t listen to me, I’m not sure, but I think a BeOS font is called “Swis”-something. Anyway, I do like the one BeOS use allready.
Well, it could be used (it’s not that bad), but I’m afraid there might be some license issues.
Besides, Futura has this artistic look and feel that’s easier on your soul than the typical industrial Helvetica rip off.
But nobody’s saying you can’t change the font settings on your own desktop
At least what I’ve been talking about here isn’t the regular font used for the desktop, but something much more high-profile: the Haiku font. This would be, in concept, the same as the font used for the Fedora logo and such. IOW, the look for Haiku stuff. At this point, unless you have purchased Adobe Illustrator or whatever it is that Futura regularly comes bundled with or you’ve shelled out the 25 bucks to Linotype, you have no access to it. ATM, this includes Haiku as an organization, which seems rather dumb IMO. While I’m not in position to officially say “yes, this is THE font for Haiku”, I’m pretty sure the other guys would agree that we need our own font.
The default font for the actual desktop environment that is set in the Font preferences is already pretty much set - Bitstream’s Vera font families. They are well-done general purpose fonts, and although they don’t look all that good under R5 because of the poor text antialiasing it has, they look very nice under Haiku. Of course, it’s up to distributors if they want to use a different one.
Work has begun. Hopefully I can come up with a pre-pre-pre-release before new year, at least with the most important letters (A H I K U , though to be used in another order )
Futura looks a lot like Twentieth Century, so I’m been looking a lot on both, and is right now working on some of the details in regard to letter spacing, and some of the more tricky letters and numbers.
It’s going to be a mostly artistic font, though highly readable.