London’s Design Museum recognises Ubuntu fonts

London 24th January 2011: The Ubuntu Project today announced the opening of a new exhibition at London’s Design Museum dedicated to the Ubuntu Font, in collaboration with international typeface designers Dalton Maag.

Entitled ‘Shape my language’, the exhibition will run from 28th January to 28th February 2011. The exhibition marks a significant milestone for the Ubuntu Project’s advance in design and aims to enhance the consumer experience of using open computing platforms, such as Ubuntu.

Leading international typeface designers Dalton Maag has headed up development of the Ubuntu Font Family and the family has been designed with both aesthetics and productivity in mind. The stylish design helps users and developers to portray and emphasise their message through the typeface, which has been carefully crafted to allow readers to easily absorb written content.

The development of the Ubuntu Font Family is funded by Canonical Ltd on behalf of the wider free software community. As expected of the Ubuntu project, the fonts are free to use and legal to share, sell, bundle and build upon.

“It is heartening to have the outstanding work on the Ubuntu Font Family recognised by such a prestigious authority as the Design Museum” said Ivanka Majic, Creative Strategy Lead of Ubuntu.“We wanted to build a comprehensive high quality font in collaboration with Dalton Maag that would reflect the innovation and creativity of the open source world in its design. We also chose to share this with the web developers worldwide as an open source font. The exhibition recognises how the Ubuntu Project is as much about design and user experience as it is about delivering great software.”

For further details of the “Shape My Language” exhibition, please visit:
http://designmuseum.org/design-overtime

About the Ubuntu Font Family

The Ubuntu Font Family debuted in the current Ubuntu 10.10 release of the Ubuntu operating system and is also available for download from font.ubuntu.com. The Ubuntu Font Family can also be accessed through the Google Font Directory. Any web designer can now pick Ubuntu from the Google Font Directory via the Google Font API, and bring the beauty and legibility of the Ubuntu fonts to their web properties.

How to add the Ubuntu Font Family:

http://code.google.com/webfonts (Select “Ubuntu” and insert the two lines of CSS provided)
http://font.ubuntu.com/ (Complete open-source font download).

Notes for editors

About Google Font API and Font Directory: The Google Font API serves over 30 million font views for web pages per day. The Google Web Fonts Team is establishing a core set of web fonts and simple to use technology that can be used openly across devices and platforms. Using a Google web font is as simple selecting it from the directory and copying a few lines into a web page. Visit: code.google.com/webfonts

About Canonical Ltd

Canonical provides engineering, online and professional services to Ubuntu partners and customers worldwide. As the company behind the Ubuntu project, Canonical is committed to the production and support of Ubuntu – an ever-popular and fast-growing open-source operating system. It aims to ensure that Ubuntu is available to every organisation and individual on servers, desktops, laptops and netbooks.

Canonical partners with computer hardware manufacturers to certify Ubuntu, provides migration, deployment, support and training services to businesses, and offers online services direct to end users. Canonical also builds and maintains collaborative, open-source development tools to ensure that organisations and individuals can participate fully in innovations within the open-source community. For more information, please visit www.canonical.com

About Dalton Maag: Dalton Maag has been creating unique fonts and logotypes for some of the world’s largest organizations and brands since 1991. Today, Dalton Maag has a international team of fifteen designers, engineers, and other font specialists at studios in the UK and Brazil.

Dalton Maag partners with graphic designers as font experts in their branding projects. Its strongly international team gives Dalton Maag expertise in scripts beyond Latin, having designed and engineered typefaces for Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Indic scripts.

For more information about Dalton Maag and its client portfolio, visit http://www.daltonmaag.com/.