Comfortaa is a sans-serif typeface created by Johan Aakerlund, a young and very talented, self-taught font designer from Denmark who has been creating fonts for around 2 years now. I asked Johan what inspired him to create Comfortaa, and he responded, “What really got me interested in fonts in the first place was actually a documentary on Helvetica that i watched. At that time my favorite font was Century Gothic, but I wanted a softer (and plainly different) alternative, but with some of the same qualities as Century Gothic. So after searching a while without finding one I decided to try and design it myself.” He has named it Comfortaa because of his goal of making it ‘comfortable.’
Johan recently changed Comfortaa’s license such that it is now licensed under the Open Font License. Comfortaa is a great font feature-wise, because it features three weights:
Comfortaa’s coverage is also great. Fedora’s design team has been running a trial of Comfortaa to see if it’d be a suitable headline font for Fedora, and we’ve found it has much better glyph coverage in our languages than our current headline font, MgOpen Modata. One big win, for example, is Comfortaa’s Cyrillic support (it looks like only ‘Ҙ’ ‘Ҫ’ ‘Ҡ’ and ‘Ӏ’ are missing below):
Comfortaa is a clean & contemporary font that will serve you well as a heading font and in logo treatments. For example,
Luya Tshimbalanga (who first introduced the Fedora Design team to Comfortaa) used this font in the headlines for Muffin, the French Fedora user magazine (MgOpen Modata didn’t have sufficient glyphs for French!) Emily Dirsh, our recent design bountry winner also used it as a headline font in the Fedora slide presentation template. Typographically-speaking, Comfortaa can be considered a geometric sans serif font; geometric because some of the letterforms are based around geometric forms, such as the lowercase ‘a’ and ‘o’ being so close to perfect circles. The width of the letterforms is also quite uniform (meaning it’s not a humanist font.)
Comfortaa is licensed under the Open Font License.
- Fedora Font Wishlist Entry:https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Comfortaa
- Upstream Homepage: http://aajohan.deviantart.com/art/Comfortaa-font-105395949
So, you want to package Comfortaa?
The Fedora design team is planning to replace MgOpen Modata with Comfortaa in our brand guidelines. Getting Comfortaa packaged into Fedora is then a very important step. So if you would be willing to help us out, it would be very much appreciated, not just to expand the range of fonts available in Fedora but also to help improve Fedora’s branding!
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 Font
The last font this blog series covered was Gillus ADF. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?
Yes, font blog posts are back! Probably not weekly though. I’ll give monthly a shot! :).
nice, I always liked your font blog post 😉
Hey Máirín, don't know if you saw my blog post about The Board. Here it is:
http://lucasr.org/2010/07/24/introducing-the-boar…
I'm looking for a free (as in freedom) font to use by default in The Board. Any suggestion for a font that would go well with this kind of app?
Hey Lucas, if you want a freedom-free handwriting-style font, one I like to use is called Rufscript: http://hiran.in/blog/rufscript-font
+1 for Rufscript, this is what I used in my comic too (moved to it from another one).
Thanks for a successful campaign. Not only the font is awesome, but also you managed to sensibilize the author to the benefits of the licences we are so fond of.
I look forward to see more design improvements on Fedora! Keep up the good work, no doubt it will pay off.
Thank you for discoveri me this font. I like it, it's clean and nice!
Ah! I like this one, especially the light version. Thanks. 🙂
I know!!!! The light version is really sweet 🙂 Glad you like it!
I've been researching free fonts myself this last week.
After a lot of tests, I've found the best serif fonts to be: Junicode (Garamond-like), URW Palladio (Palatino-like) and Linux Libertine (Times-like). These are all high-quality and have bold, italics, bold italics, small-caps and old-style figures.
When it comes to sans-serif fonts, the situation is a lot more bleak. The condensed version of DejaVu Sans is usable. Other than that, I've only found Lucida Sans (comes with Sun's Java, not re-distributable). However, this Lucida Sans font is badly spaced and lacks basic ligatures.
Hi el Primo, have you seen earlier posts in this blog series? You might find more you like:
http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/unpackaged-f…
That's the link I have bookmarked, as the category link at the top of your posts doesn't work — it points to en.wordpress.com instead of your site. (I don't know how to fix it, sorry!)
I am willing to package Comfortaa. That will be the first time I will package a font but the process should not be hard. spec file and source rpms will be available as soon as possible.
I always used UnDinaru as my interface font. That's a Korean font that closely resembles MgOpen Modata, but had all those accented glyphs and Ns with tilde that Spanish-speaking people like me love.
Although I love this as a definitive solution, please, give UnDinaru a shot.
Check out this new font: MK12 Chadwick
http://telephoneme.tv/
made for this film: