Home / ATypI All Over 2020

Date Tuesday, October 27th 2020

Font Bakery

Viviana Monsalve

Learn what Font Bakery is for, how it is used at Google Fonts, and how it can help you save time and publish high-quality fonts. Quality Assurance of fonts is a constant requirement for type designers, foundries, and distributors. Everyone has their own workflows to ensure their fonts are in good condition, but often these are fragments and run on individual font files rather than overall projects. Font Bakery is a checking tool that checks overall projects from source to binary font formats and more. The project was initiated by Dave Crossland in 2013 to accelerate the onboarding process for Google Fonts. In 2017, Lasse Fister rewrote it into a modern, modular architecture with a web dashboard suitable for both individuals and large distributors. Font Bakery has checks at three levels: Format specifications, distributor requirements, and custom checks. It now has an active community of contributors from foundries around the world. This workshop introduces Font Bakery, unpacks the opportunity for designers and foundries to collaborate on font quality assurance, and walks everyone through the project participation process to improve each person’s font production and publishing workflows. (Font Bakery is developed with financial support from Google, but is not an official Google product.)

Significant progress has been made on Font Bakery since Crossland presented it as a workshop at ATypI 2018 in Antwerp. Anyone who attended that session will benefit from attending again.

Dave Crossland attended the first Libre Graphics Meeting in 2006, and became fascinated with the potential of libre licensing to improve design. Since then, he has worked to liberate typography, mainly as a program manager for Google Fonts. He also regularly contributes to the Crafting Type, Font Bakery, and Runebender projects.

Felipe Sanches is a software freedom activist and developer with contributions to the development of graphic design, CAD, 3D printing, and 3D modeling libre software such as Inkscape, OpenSCAD, and GNU LibreDWG. For the last few years, Sanches has provided professional libre software development services focused on font engineering and quality assurance for fonts. Learn more about Sanches’ work at https://www.fsf.org/working-together/profiles/felipe-sanches.

Lasse Fister studied design and is freelancing as a font engineer and full-stack web developer. He’s into type, tooling, creative thinking, and programming and has a keen interest in using and making free/libre open-source software.⁠ Lasse Fister studied design and is freelancing as a font engineer and full-stack web developer. He’s into type, tooling, creative thinking, and programming and has a keen interest in using and making free/libre open-source software.

"Viviana Monsalve is a Colombian graphic designer from the National University of Colombia with postgraduate studies in Digital and Typography Design at the University of Buenos Aires. After working in design studios in Colombia and Argentina, being part of communication teams in public and private companies, and teaching undergraduate typography classes, Monsalve is now an independent graphic and type designer. Her interest in typography lies in considering it as a technology, one with the power of making written culture more accessible and functional for a broader audience. Recently, Monsalve has become more involved in font production, contributing mainly to the font projects onboarding process at Google Fonts."