Is the improved version going to be free?

hhp

Hrant!

The Regular version will always be free thanks to the support of Google team, who made it possible. But the rest will have a commercial licence, that's the only way I can dedicate the necessary time to design the font.

From my view, for a text font, first order of business: fix the vertical proportions. Because of how Latin-using languages use the vertical space, the ascenders should normally be longer than the descenders. Design is about balancing compromises, and to me the best benchmark is the "g": it has to look slightly vertically cramped (and slightly too small overall) for other more important things not to go wrong. And your "g" is too happy. :-)

that's the only way I can dedicate the necessary time

I wish all open-source/free font advocates could so clearly admit the inevitable connection between time/effort/money and quality.

hhp

I should have said this in the same breath:
Whether you decide to shorten and descenders versus lengthen the ascenders depends mostly on what point size range you're shooting for. Practically speaking (I mean in terms of saving effort) unless you have a size range firmly in mind, the way the spacing and color are already playing along* will determine which way to go: the bigger the x-height, the looser the spacing and the darker the color, because you're shooting for a smaller size (and vice versa). And before you get into specifics you need to decide if this is intended more for screen or print; check out Merriweather** for a nice design that's really screen-centric however.

* With your (existing) cap height also playing a role.

** http://typophile.com/node/102523

hhp

Thanks for the feedback Hrant, it really helps :)