This year we went back to our old tradition of producing a letterpress holiday card. The card, designed by Elliot Jay Stocks, Creative Director for Typekit, and printed by Norman Clayton of Classic Letterpress, is the first printed piece for the recently combined Adobe Type and Adobe Typekit teams. It is set in Garamond Premier Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach.

I’ve included a photo of the card below to spread our holiday greeting beyond those to whom we sent a printed copy.

Ying Ning

Tonny Xu

Vincent Ding

Hai Liang

Takesato Hayashi

Without them, and all of the other individuals we mentioned in December, this program would not be a success.

To learn more about the Adobe Type Community Translation program, refer to Typblography project page. If you have any questions or requests related to the Type Community Translation program feel free to reach out to us at type-translations@adobe.com.

This year’s holiday card was set entirely in Source Code Pro, designed by Paul D. Hunt, making use of its monospaced nature. Design and layout was done by Frank Grießhammer, who is a big fan of Unicode’s Box Drawing characters (U+2500 – U+259F).

Happy Holidays, and the best wishes for 2013 from the whole Adobe Type team:

Caleb Belohlavek
Frank Grießhammer
Gu Hua
Masataka Hattori
Paul D. Hunt
David Lemon
Ken Lunde
Ernest March
Nicole Minoza
Ryoko Nishizuka
Read Roberts
Steve Ross
Robert Slimbach
Christopher Slye
Miguel Sousa
Taro Yamamoto

Gerhard Großmann
Dominik Rothenberg
Stefan Huber
Agnieszka Baniewska
Sebastian Tauber
Frank Adebiaye
Marcus Bonszkowski
Maximilian Seiderer
Rafael Saraiva
Tania Raposo
Rafael de Azevedo
Natanael Gama
Leonardo Schenkel
Igor Freiberger

To learn more about the Adobe Type Community Translation program, refer to Typblography project page. If you have any questions or requests related to the Type Community Translation program feel free to reach out to us at type-translations@adobe.com.

Our ultimate goal is to be able to provide our typeface notes in multiple languages, many of which are otherwise under-served. However, for this pilot program, we’ll be focusing on getting translations for four different languages: German, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese. If these translation efforts are successful, we’ll happily make other languages available for translation.

Based on the recent success Adobe has seen with community translation, we’re excited about launching a community translation program for Adobe Type. We believe the type community, although comparatively small, consists of enough individuals passionate about type to make this program a success.  To reward our contributors, we’ll be offering free copies of fonts for which Adobe owns the rights. For every ten translations which are accepted by the moderator for that language, contributors can request five free fonts from the list of Adobe owned fonts (currently totals more than 800 fonts).  Moderators will be looking for translations that use the appropriate type vernacular and capture the essence of what’s being communicated. Requests for fonts and any questions/comments about the Adobe Type Community Translation pilot program should be sent to type-translations@adobe.com.

The remainder of this blog post focuses on the Adobe Translator application and how to contribute to this translation project.

The Dashboard

To access the application go to http://community.translate.adobe.com/translator/. After successfully logging into the application with your Adobe ID (you may have to create one first), you will see the Adobe Translator Dashboard. This Dashboard shows a menu at the top and a list of projects available for translation.  If needed, help can be accessed from the About menu at the top.

Adobe Translator Dashboard

Selecting projects

The project list is sorted alphabetically by product name. Within each product box, you can find the languages that are available for community translation for that product.

To see the Typeface Notes projects you can either scroll down until you see “Adobe Typeface Notes” or you can use the search box on the right side of the Dashboard. Simply enter “Type” into the search box and hit enter.

Once you see the Adobe Typeface Notes project, you can click on it and start translating right away. After clicking on a project, you will see it appear in the “Browse Project” list on the left side of the dashboard. If the project is not yet one of your favorites, the button “Add” provides the option to add that project permanently to your list of favorites, indicated by a blue star.

Adding projects to your “Favorite Projects” list

If you plan to contribute to the Adobe Typeface Notes project repeatedly or over a longer period of time, you can add the project to a list of favorites. This can be achieved by clicking on the gray star appearing in a project box when you hover over it with the cursor. When clicking the grey star, the star will turn blue, the project will be added to your favorites list, and you will receive an additional notification confirming your action at the lower right of your screen.

Translating projects

To perform translation tasks, you can click on the project name in the favorites list on the left side of the dashboard. When you click, the project box will expand and you have the option to see

• the strings available for translation, when clicking on “Translate”,
• the strings that have suggested translations available for review, when clicking on “Review”,
• or the strings with approved translations, when clicking on “Approved.

Translation Screen

On the translation screen, translators can start contributing right away. Just select a source string and enter a translation in the text field. There may or may not be a translation proposal that Adobe Translator is providing with the help of machine translation or translation memory (“in the past, this string has been translated as …”). Submit your suggestion and move on to the next string.

Summary

We are excited to launch this new program and engage with the Type Community to enhance Adobe’s typeface notes. As stated earlier, the success of this program depends on the willingness of individuals who are passionate about type and willing to contribute to a collaborative translation effort. For those of you interested in learning more about the Adobe Translator you can access the application. To learn more about Adobe’s other Community Translation projects visit Adobe Community Translation page on Facebook. And again, for any comments/questions about the Adobe Type Community Translation program, feel free to email us at type-translations@adobe.com.

Our holiday card is supposed to set you in the right mood for a sparkling holiday time; click on the image above to experience a truly starry experience! Close observers might even get a glimpse of an unreleased typeface – which has been obfuscated using a seasonal Python script.

Happy Holidays – and all the best for 2012 – from the whole Type Team:

Caleb Belohlavek
Frank Grießhammer
Gu Hua
Masataka Hattori
Paul D. Hunt
David Lemon
Ken Lunde
Ernest March
Nicole Minoza
Ryoko Nishizuka
Read Roberts
Steve Ross
Robert Slimbach
Christopher Slye
Miguel Sousa
Taro Yamamoto
Weizhi Yang

The set of 186 fonts includes 22 brand new Adobe Web Fonts. These new fonts are available through both of our partners, WebINK and Typekit, and adds three new families to the Adobe Web Font collection.

Sanvito is an upright script typeface designed by Adobe’s Principal Type Designer, Robert Slimbach. It was designed to combine the spontaneity and liveliness of calligraphic writing with the clarity and practicality of a more formal typeface. Since its release in 1993, Sanvito has been used for display settings as well as informal purposes such as correspondence, flyers, and letterheads. This release includes four fonts from the Sanvito Pro family.

Also included in this release are eight fonts from the Kepler Std family. Kepler is a contemporary type family designed by Robert Slimbach in the tradition of classic, modern 18th century typefaces. Modern typefaces are known for their cool academic quality, but Slimbach’s Kepler captures the modern style in a humanistic manner. It is elegant and refined, with a hint of oldstyle proportion and calligraphic detail that gives it warmth and energy.

Brioso, another typeface created by Robert Slimbach, is designed in the calligraphic tradition. It emulates a finely-penned Roman and italic script, retaining the immediacy of hand lettering while having the scope and functionality of a contemporary composition family. Brioso blends the humanity of written forms with the clarity of digital design, allowing designers to set pages of refined elegance. Seven fonts from the Brioso Pro family are included in this release.

Although not a new family in the Adobe Web Font collection, this release includes three more fonts from the Myriad Pro family (Myriad Pro Light SemiCondensed Italic, Myriad Pro Bold SemiCondensed Italic and Myriad Pro Black SemiCondensed Italic). This brings the number of web fonts available in this popular family to thirty.

We look forward to seeing these new Adobe Web Fonts on the web and welcome WebINK as an Adobe Web Fonts partner. To learn more about Adobe Web Fonts, visit our Adobe Web Fonts page.

– David L

To help keep things fresh, Adobe Systems has a program dedicated to bringing in people just out of college. As part of this program, we now have the opportunity to add someone in the Type team. If you’ve just received your Masters degree or are in your final year, you might be the person we’re looking for.

As you’ve seen reading earlier posts in this blog, we’re a small team. Each person here handles many responsibilities, so there’s no shortage of interesting challenges to go around. Our approach to work is pretty collaborative, and relies on a lot of face-to-face interaction, so you’d need to be willing & able to work in San Jose, California.

Adobe continues to define the state of the art in font technology and type design. This position involves working as part of a world-class development team to enhance current fonts, develop new fonts, and collaborate on new designs. This would include activities like creating layout features, optimizing fonts for screen viewing, and extending existing Adobe designs.

Knowledge & skills required
–  Related professional experience
–  Strong design skills in the Latin script, and ideally other scripts
–  Clear grasp of font technologies and scripting languages, and mastery of font development tools
–  Demonstrated ability to work well as part of a team
–  MA in Typography or Type Design preferred

If this sounds like you, please contact me at lemon@adobe.com

Further improvements are certainly possible, but for the time being, we hope the current changes make your Typblography experience a bit more pleasant!