What exactly is the MeeGo font?
Spent an interesting week at MeeGo Conf in San Francisco this week. Overall, a very impressive project that’s doing something no other embedded OS is even attempting: building an open source, cross-platform OS for devices (netbooks, phones, tablets, cars, TVs & set-tops, etc., etc.). Why is that important? Cause if you think “app stores” are going to stay on phones and phones alone, you’re woefully behind-the-times. And all MeeGo products are guaranteed to be compliant, so the same apps will run on all of them. Even Google, in spite of the fact that Android is ostensibly open source, is trying to push three separate OSes for its device strategy: Android, ChromeOS, GoogleTV. Hope you like writing the same game/music player/browser three times, developers! And the fact that MeeGo just happens to be compatible with desktop Linux distributions — just gravy.
On the other hand, there are some unfortunate “black boxes” in the larger MeeGo project, presumably relics of upstream corporate bootstrapping. One of those is branding. At more than one session, I heard community members beg and plead for somebody to drop the preschooler-like cartoon characters. That’d be wise.
More directly, however, we have a problem with the logotype. The MeeGo wiki details the logo itself:
… and gives typography guidelines for the “MeeGo font,” which it describes as DIN, linking to the Wikipedia entry on the family. It also shows a specimen, in three weights:
Pretty clear, right? Well, not really. You see, whatever font they actually chose, it’s at the very least a proprietary remake of DIN. You can verify that by looking at the two open font implementations of DIN, Paulo Silva’s Open DIN Schriften Engshrift and Open Source Publishing’s OSP DIN. Here’s a side-by-side sample:
As you can see, neither is even close. Starkly different proportions and weights. Neither has the same non-alphabetic glyphs (though I have no idea where any of them come from). And that includes the text sample; re-reading the MeeGo wiki page, it could be interpreted to say that the MeeGo logotype is not in DIN at all, but rather is an original design. But regardless of whether that is the intent, the vague “use DIN” instructions can’t be followed, because whatever font they’re using, it’s not available in open source form. Moreover, since both of the open DIN revivals are based on scanning the original paper designs, it’s clear that they better represent the original typeface — the MeeGo design team may have bought a nice font, but you can hardly call it DIN. It’s some sort of derivative. And they won’t say which.
So what now? Adopt an open source DIN for MeeGo? Specify which proprietary DIN-derivative is in use, then wait for a font designer to produce a MeeGo-compatible variant of one of the open versions? Ditch it all together, and pick something with a little more character?
The latter option might be worth considering, since even if you ignore the fact that DIN is a blasé street-sign face that makes you sad just to look at, reading through OSP’s blog on the subject reveals that the widely-repeated mantra that the original DIN was “put into the public domain” is less-than-documented and less-than-clear. So that’s at least two strikes, maybe three, depending on how highly you value your local streetsign. But who knows; maybe there is a third open source DIN revival out there that I simply haven’t located yet. Any hints?
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