Kurt Shintaku's Blog

With the release of Beta 2 for Windows Vista and Office 2007, some folks have noticed our recent inclusion of a new set of fonts that we’ve created.  There’s a fairly involved commentary about them here: http://neosmart.net/blog/archives/182. 

 

Instead of rehashing the same discussion that everyone else is having about these fonts, (there’s a video from Channel 9 that goes over most of the fonts – http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=146749) I thought I’d comment about Microsoft Typography in general.  A lot of people don’t even know about Microsoft Typography – it’s a group of folks within Microsoft that are their own little dev team of creatives that are considered to be at the forefront of typography – the study and creation of typefaces and fonts.

 

This might not seem like a big deal to you but it’s incredibly important to computers overall.  People forget how important fonts are when it comes to personal style as well as readability and overall attitude toward an interface or a written page.  Everyone knows someone that fit these bills:

 

– The guy that can’t figure out how to use anything except Times Roman

– The girl down the hall that has to use Comic Sans for everything she writes

– The guy that bold faces everything , overuses CAPITAL LETTERS and uses 4 different colors in his email

– The girl that has to use Lucida Handwriting or some weird unreadable script

– The guy that writes everything in Courier New

… fonts tell us a lot about the author that chooses them

 

I remember back in 1998, I got the chance to chat with a guy named Frank Artale, a Microsoft General Manager for Windows NT 5.0 (what eventually became Windows 2000) and an all around good guy.  Everyone liked Frank – he was a former Southern California SE like myself back in the late 80’s so SoCal always enjoyed having him.  He had just taken on a larger job role in the Windows Product Group that included, among other things, responsibility for the Microsoft Typography team.

 

I sat there eating lunch with him and he told me that he was told by some higher ups that he was responsible for this Typography group.  Not knowing anything about Typography, he decided to pay them a visit and see what the group was like.  When he got to their end of the building, they were all in a conference room with a the lights off staring at a projection of someone’s laptop.  On the screen was a letter "G" and everyone was just looking at it in silence.

 

Frank, not knowing what was going on or what to do, simply followed along and stared right along with everyone else.  Then, one of the people near the laptop reached over and clicked on something with the mouse.  A little dot appeared on the character "G" making it a little rounder. 

 

Suddenly, everyone in the room squealed.  Some said in an outburst, "THERE WE GO!" and others high-fived each other.  The lights went on, some folks started up conversations, and people seemed genuinely elated.  Frank – wide-eyed at this point – quietly slipped out of the room, shaking his head.  He told me that he figured it’d be best to just leave these folks to do their jobs because he didn’t know a damned thing about what was going on and until he did, he wasn’t gonna screw with them.

 

It made me get interested in seeing what was going on with our Typography group back then and I learned that they have their own web site at:  http://www.microsoft.com/typography.   They also participate in conferences and events that are oriented around fonts and typography like http://www.typecon.com and http://www.atypi.org/06_Lisbon.

 

Oh, by the way, a bunch of these fonts are downloadable here, if you own Visual Studio.  They’re licensed only for use by folks that own VS.

 

EPILOGUE:

The last time I checked, Frank had moved on to work for Veritas but I see now that he created Consera, a software company that HP acquired.  He’s since then moved on to work as a BizDev guy for XenSource, a Virtual Server/Microsoft Hypervisor competitor (as well as a VMWare competitor) that uses open source software.  Sometime I’ll write about the time a group of Partners/Consulting organizations formally asked Frank about making the Registry more accessible and better documented.