Just found out about this great resource for Greek type design thanks to the book I just received, Greek Letters: From Tablets to Pixels (which I will review here soon). If you are designing Greek glyphs for your fonts or are considering it, or simply appreciate the beauty of these sensuous letterforms, check out this site for the Greek Font Society: http://www.greekfontsociety.gr/pages/en_about.html There are some historic Greek fonts available for free download; some support the Latin alphabet, others do not.
An excellent hour-long presentation by Steve Matteson, Director of Type Design for Ascender Corporation. From YouTube: "Steve presents the path to the Xbox 360's new look from the type designer's perspective: the evolution of the product, the design brief, the creative process, and the unique challenges of developing a font for less than optimal screen displays. Steve also discusses the business and technology of fonts, the work for the Android platform and, most importantly, why type matters in an age of multimedia and text messaging."
I particularly enjoyed Steve's comparison of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic in terms of the "fluidity" of the letterforms. (I would be tempted to say "sensuality".) I've become increasingly aware of these differences as I write out my ancient Greek lessons and begin to add Greek lowercase letters to some of my fonts. Harmonizing the extreme differences between Greek and Cyrillic esthetics can be challenging.
At around 40:00, Steve discusses the evolution of the Droid family of fonts. (You can see the final versions on MyFonts: http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/ascender/droid-sans-pro/) Fascinating how constraints influence, and sometimes even improve, a type design.
I'm having fun adding alternates (shown above in #1) and OpenType features to a new version of Goudy Trajan, which could easily qualify as what many foundries call a "Pro" version. The Regular weight is well under way. I'm currently working on small caps, but that is a can of worms, as all three weights of the family will support not only Central and Eastern European languages (Latin Extended A), but also Cyrillic (#3 above) and Greek (modern); so, that's a lot of small caps, not to mention all the extra kerning involved (small caps to small caps, uppercase to small caps, small caps to small-cap punctuation, etc.)! I've added over 20 ligatures for Latin and will add several for Greek and Cyrillic each. If you have any suggestions about what other goodies should be in a so-called "Pro" font, please let me know.
UPDATE: An intermediate version of Goudy Trajan Regular has just been released for beta testing. It has most of the features of the "Pro" version, but not small caps, or Greek. You can download it for free at: http://www.castletype.com/html/tipoteca/goudy-trajan-regular.html. This is a completely functional font with many improvements over the versions that have been available for the last several years. Give it a try, then feel free to suggest ways to improve it even more.
