One of the decisions we made for GNOME 3 in terms of identity, was embracing Dave Crossland’s Cantarell and its open source pedigree and making the typeface our own. So far I have only been humbly shaping minor aspects of the typeface, but a long standing issue has been left long untouched, support for Cyrillic. Typeface design is certainly going outside my comfort zone. Luckily most of the glyphs can be dealt with by borrowing from their latin counterparts. The major part of the work involved (and will involve) some shape tweaks, metrics and hinting. Again, the bold weight poses bigger challenges at small sizes, which is our main focus.

Substituted cyrillic glyphs were all sorts of broken.

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As you can see, there’s still some tweaking left to do on the shapes and hints before rolling out 0.0.9, but those not intimidated by jhbuild, please give it a go so you can help me identify issues that aren’t apprent to me. Another set Cantarell needs to support is Greek, as it’s stylistictically required to keep close to the Latin set.

You can grab the project file from the gnome design repository (you might need to clone the whole repo to get the textures).

Continuing to embrace the unique Gorilla style I would be undoing hundreds of hours of work we invested in the Tango project. I am happy to see people willingly or inadvertently staying within the boundaries set by the guidelines. There is nothing worse than getting a fan mail from someone who has assembled a “theme” composed of all the clashing styles you have created.

Gorilla, you’re my (the?) first SVG icon set, you are my darling. But the world is better without you. Rest in peace.

Part 5 — Animation

Part 3 — Textures

Part 4 — Mapping