The announcement of the development of a new generation of fonts Georgia and Verdana

The Ascender Corporation, Carter & Cone and The Font Bureau, Inc., in collaboration with Microsoft, announced a project to develop an expansion of headsets from the Georgia and Verdana family. This project started over a year ago and the first headsets are expected in the first quarter of 2010.

Initially, the headsets of the Georgia and Verdana family were presented by Microsoft for on-screen display. Designed by Matthew Carter and Tom Rickner (an Ascender employee who completed all the hinting work), these fonts were released in 1996 in the Core fonts for the Web font set, and later supplied with an add-on to Internet Explorer 4.0.


Today, the Georgia and Verdana headsets are among the most common fonts. Both Georgia and Verdana provided the necessary clarity of display at the most necessary moment - during the explosive growth of the Internet. Their clear design successfully coped with the task of perceiving perception when reading content and mail online or in printed form.
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Each family contains large x-heights, open inside open spaces, high contrast between regular and bold patterns, ample spacing and a design that allows you to distinguish between similar shapes of characters. The fonts contain comprehensive hinting to improve the rendering of both small and large font sizes in Microsoft Windows and are designed to support the full European character set (WGL Pan-European character).

The Ascender, Carter & Cone, and Font Bureau project aims to optimize Verdana and Georgia fonts for many applications, including advanced text formatting on websites and for printing. The Georgia / Verdana project will provide the following improvements for these fonts:

* new styles (weights and widths) in addition to the four existing for each family;
* extended character set;
* improved kerning;
* OpenType new typographic features for improved typography.

“Verdana and Georgia were proposed by Microsoft as a solution for simple screen font tasks: sanserif and serif in regular, bold and italics, designed for maximum readability.” Says Matthew Carter of Carter & Cone Type Inc. “New additions to the font families are a natural and time-driven progress. These innovations offer a wider range of typographical possibilities, both for display on the screen and for printing, while at the same time maintaining compatibility with the original versions. ”

“The expanded and improved families of Georgia and Verdana will be attractive to many of those who publish or print,” said David Berlow, one of the founders of The Font Bureau. “These changes will expand the boundaries of creativity for professionals, for whom these font families were previously the main workhorses,” added David.

“Georgia and Verdana have paved the way for screen reading,” says Ira Mirochnick, president of Ascender. “We now have an unprecedented opportunity to put together design and development teams consisting of Matthew Carter, David Berlow, Steve Mattson and Tom Rickner to improve these special fonts. Their work will offer everyone, from Microsoft Office users to professional designers, a great selection of additional fonts that we believe will make the Georgia and Verdana families even more widely used than they are today. ”

“We expect that the Georgia and Verdana families will live for a long time,” says Simon Daniels, lead head of font support at Microsoft, “and we are very pleased to be able to build these great fonts with Ascender, Carter & Cone and The Font Bureau. Soon, these fonts will be available to our users. ”