I'd heard that they had recently laid-off everyone in their fonts department. I don't know any details about the situation, though.

I think you were misinformed, cuttle. Thomas Phinney, Typophile regular, still works full time as a product manager for their font department and Robert Slimbach still designs type full time, as far as I know. The dept. may be much smaller than a few years ago, but it is still active.

You can read more about their latest work, Arno, and Phinney has something of his own coming out soon. Maybe he can tell us more.

You people should read typophile ;-)

http://typophile.com/node/30174

Gauge, coming soon.

Aww, I don't blame them, Si. Once a thread gets to be 2 pages long I'll bet it loses 80% of its readership.

Hey, I'll be overjoyed if I'm misinformed.

That's right Mr. Phinney can then tell us what the deal is!!!

Mikey

Adobe still has a type group of about ten people. In fact, we just hired a new font production person and budding type designer last spring (and advertised the position on Typophile, my blog, and many other places) - Typophile regular Miguel Sousa.

These days, we release on average about two type families a year, many of which win awards. Mostly it's in-house designs from Robert Slimbach, and occasional outside designs commissioned to cover languages we don't have in-house expertise for. So recently we've had Arabic, Hebrew and Thai fonts made for us by Tiro Typeworks, for example.

The pace of new releases has slowed considerably, in part due to a smaller staff, but even more due to the huge growth in complexity and size of our typefaces. Looking at our last big release and our next couple of releases, it looks like our typical new typeface has about 3000 glyphs per font. This is the result of both language support and typographic features.

Coming up, we have two new typefaces to debut this spring. Robert Slimbach's Arno Pro has already been seen in beta form, bundled with the Photoshop CS3 public beta, and has been the subject of a Typophile thread

My own Hypatia Sans Pro is in the works. We're running out of time, so Miguel and Robert will be doing the kerning, with me just keeping an eye on it and making a few suggestions. Meanwhile I've been spending my time polishing the outlines, with considerable input from Robert.

Robert's typeface "Gauge" (working title only) is more of a prototype at this point, and I can't tell you anything about a release date, but it can be seen to some extent in the new Adobe product icons that have been blogged about

Christopher Slye has been busy with the tiny project of doing technical fixes to our entire library, for a planned future dot release.

Oh, and don't ask me about schedule for any of the above. I can't say, except that Arno and Hypatia Sans will ship with some Adobe products in the near future.

So, we're not dead yet.

Cheers,

T

Thanks Tom!

Glad to hear Adobe is still the powerhouse I know and love.

Mike

So where does the name for Hypatia Sans come from? And since it's specifically called a sans, does that mean that there is a serif in the works as well?

Must be...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_of_Alexandria

Ok, so she was murdered with roof tiles. That's a cool way to die. Unless you're a roofer, I guess.

The typeface will be a humanist sans. It will be an update of a classical Greek typeform, but not in the vein of Lithos Pro. It will be more more influenced by the Roman letterforms of similar era, with classical proportions used by many of the great serif typefaces such as Jensen, Granjon, etc.

It will be a humanist sans, but not as rounded as Cronos Pro. It will be more geometric, with straight edges and possibly slight flaring ALA Optima or Beorcana.

And the lc i's will have little hearts for dots.~

Hypatia Sans Clothes

sii >>>> ahahahahah that was a good one!!!!

Dan,

pretty good guess. Thomas already showed little bits and pieces of his typeface during his Advanced MM Theory talks at TypeCon and ATypI, so I won’t break any tabus by saying that Hypatia Sans is a sanserif with a geometric structure, very slightly flared strokes, classic uppercase proportions (will go well with Trajan Pro) and an interesting lowercase (small x-height/long ascenders and descenders, short spurs on the ascenders). The lighter weights of Hypatia remind me of Rudolf Koch's Kabel a bit.

Not sure about the hearts though.

Adam

Yes, it's named after Hypatia of Alexandria. I was looking for an interesting philosopher who was into geometry, so as to imply a straddling of the humanist and geometric genres.

The "sans" in the name does leave the door open for other variants, but we'll see how exhausted I am after this one. 3000 glyphs per font is about 2000 more than I really want to do again. However, I do occasionally fantasize about doing a slab serif, and then finally a serifed face in the same extended family. However, I have another (smaller) type design project ahead of that in my queue, and I still need to finish Hypatia Sans. So don't hold your breath for any other variants.

Cheers,

T

But no hearts for the lc i, huh? I'm sure that would have been the feature to put it into the realm of TNR or Helvetica.~

So I can guess that it's a hybrid geometric/humanist sans, but I predict that the only team that can beat New Orleans in the Super Bowl is the Patriots? I don't think I'll quit my day job.