Minor news flash! I’ve recently released News Cycle 0.2, my fledgling open font, which you can grab from glyphography.com/fonts. Or from the project’s infrastructure homepage at Launchpad.net.  This is the first public release, which ought to be more-or-less stable for everyday use.  It includes all of Unicode Basic Latin, Latin Extended-A, and Latin Extended-B, which covers Western & Eastern European languages any many African writing systems as well.  It is fully hinted, instructed, and kerned.  The downloadable package is a plain TrueType .ttf file — just drop it in the appropriate folder on your OS of choice.

I’m also happy to announce that thanks largely to Dave Crossland, Google has added News Cycle to the Google Web Font Directory.  This means if you want to use News Cycle as the body copy font for your site, you don’t have to download it at all; just visit its page on the GWFD site, and copy-n-paste the sample code.  Google serves up the font; everybody wins.  So far, it seems to be doing respectable numbers-wise, a little over 55,000 hits in the first five days.  That’s a start.

I’ve also added a Flattr micropayment link to the project page at Glyphography.com; if you want to help out and you use Flattr, every little bit helps by freeing up some time for me from the drudgery of freelancing to work on drawing glyphs and demystifying the technical aspects of font creation.  A substantial portion of the latter process involves me bugging Dave with beginner-level questions, to which I owe him a lot of thanks and hopefully a reduction in future pester-loads.  Google also has a donation link on its directory site, so feel free to use both if you really want to help.

That whole “keep the project going” thing ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie, either.  This 0.2 release is pretty basic: it covers a lot of punctuation and enough Latin to write in, but there’s still more to come.  My plan is for the next stable release (0.4) to include Cyrillic, Greek, and an extended selection of mathematical symbols.  There will be a lot of work involved in that.  After that, I have to start in on italic and boldface variants.  It never ends.

Anyway, my thanks to everyone who’s dropped a note to say they liked how it looks, plus a special thanks to those who helped me test out the font in languages other than English.

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