Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Junction


Junction is a humanist sans-serif typeface developed by Caroline Hadilaksono. The font actually reminds me a lot of Myriad which is very popular humanist sans-serif typeface – but Junction has some unique personality traits to it. Check out that uppercase ‘D’ in my type sample above – it kind of looks like a tongue sticking out at you! It’s a spicy font 😉
Typography terminology is a bit intimidating, but I’ve been reading up a bit on the history of type and its terminology to help make this series of posts more useful. I’m about halfway through Ellen Lupton’s excellent typography book Thinking With Type and the first section of the book details the history of type from calligraphy to metal blocks to fonts on a computer. Really fascinating stuff and a very enjoyable read.
That being said, I wanted to point out that Junction is a humanist sans-serif typeface. Humanist refers to the calligraphic-like way the strokes of letters are ended and how the line widths are not one consistent width but vary depending on where in the letter they are (unlike Helvetica or Futura, where the line widths are very consistent and don’t vary at all.) Humanist typefaces I think are called ‘humanist’ because they reference / are influenced by how the human hand produces lettermarks. Sans-serif refers to the fact that the type does not have serifs, or little ‘ink wells’ at the end of each stroke (in contrast to a font like Times New Roman which does.) I believe since serifs can be difficult to render cleanly on a pixel-grid in the sizes typically used for body text, sans-serif fonts tend to be easier to read on pixel-based displays.
So, you can use Junction to give an organic feel to your text while at the same time allowing it to display crisply & cleanly on a computer screen.
Junction is licensed under the Open Font License.

So, you want to package Junction?

Legend. You’re kickin’! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

Last Week’s Font

Last week’s font was Blackout by Tyler Finck. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

On the future of these posts

I’ve taken a couple weeks’ break for the holidays and I’ve decided that once a month I’ll feature a cool unpackaged piece of FLOSS software rather than a font. So each month will have 3-4 font highlights and 1 software highlight. Thanks to everyone who responded to my call for feedback! 🙂

11 Comments

  1. Just wanted to say that your push to get quality typefaces included with the Gnome Desktop is very much appreciated. Also, the Leage of Moveable Type website was an eye-opener for me, thanks so much. I had no idea of how much the quality and originality of open source fonts has improved over the years.
    What do you think about organizing a couple font-related of Summer of Code projects? One would be a font manager capable of comparison by characteristics, exploring online font repositories, one-click installation, etc.
    The other might be somewhat more ambitious: a modern new GUI for FontForge.
    FF is a very powerful piece of software, but the user interface is intimidating.
    PS–If you haven't already, I think you might really enjoy "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst.

    1. Some SOC font-related projects would be AWESOME. Improving the FontForge UI would be amazing. I will try to check out the Bringhurst book.
      Not sure if you were aware but Alberto Ruiz and I were looking at improving the GNOME fon dialogs – of course we both got very busy so the project is on a bit of a hiatus at the moment:
      http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/gtk-font-s

  2. Hi Máirín,
    Thanks again for your efforts in bringing more attention to the quality open fonts out there and helping to get them out to more users. And to the various packagers too. Always great to read your font picks 🙂
    In case you haven't seen it yet: the OpenFontLibrary wiki has some type book recommendations you may enjoy as well: http://openfontlibrary.net/wiki/Books
    BTW you should use the upstream link to the license (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL): the current link points to a old review version which shouldn't be used because well it was just that: a draft version during the community review.
    Cheers!

    1. Hi Yosch!
      Thanks for the tip on the SIL URL. I went back through all the font-of-the-week posts and updated them with the correct URL.
      I haven't seen the OFL book recommends – thank you very much for that pointer too! 🙂

  3. when do we have a big chart of all Fonts in fedora 😉 THAT would be a good Poster for my office…

    1. If fonts are added at least at the pace Mo is pushing for, then the poster will get obsolete pretty soon…

    2. Hehehe tha would be very cool 🙂 Altho like Nicu pointed out, hopefully it would be outdated quick! Maybe a top ten poster?

  4. Honestly, I hate the shape of letter "D" in Junction, I feel it does not fit the shape of the other letters.

    1. I find it a little unsettling as well… but… at the same time it's kind of unique. I haven't used it much in body text, only titling, so I'm not sure if it really makes body text miserable.

  5. […] I’m not an expert on classifying fonts, but I believe it is a humanist sans-serif font like last week’s font, Junction. Looking at the loop in the lowercase k, the finial in the lowercase ‘a’, […]

  6. […] for each page are available for your ease of remixing! (You’ll need free and open source fonts Junction and Comic Serif Pro so make sure you have those […]

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