Google has always had a taste for creating and using their own fonts, Roboto is possibly the most well known and now there’s another to add to the list – Literata – the new font being used in Google Play Books.
Announcing the update on Twitter, the update has been advertised earlier this month in a blog post from font design company Type Together.
Introducing Google Play Books' new font, Literata. Perfect for long reads on all devices. https://t.co/VQfT6oZvVU pic.twitter.com/eF3B1MJpkX
— Google Play (@GooglePlay) May 18, 2015
Veronika Burian and José Scaglione from TypeTogether, lead their own team in co-operation with a team at Google, lead by senior UX designer Addy Lee Beavers to creat a new font that will:
provide an outstanding reading experience on a whole range of devices and high resolution screens running different rendering technologies. Additionally, the new Play Books type is meant to establish a recognisable visual identity for Google’s native eBook App and stylistically distinguish itself from other eReader competitors.
The new description of the new font i:
TypeTogether arrived at a solution of hybridisation taking inspiration from both Scotch and old-style Roman types. The resulting letterforms create a pleasant organic texture that helps to deliver very good results for ease of reading and comfort.
The secondary style is an upright italic, meaning that the letter shapes have an italicised construction and& no slant to speak of. Albeit rather uncommon in screen-fonts, this kind of genre addresses some of the inherent limitations of the square pixel grid. Moreover the resulting unusual italic adds high branding value to Literata making it unique, recognisable and easy to remember.
The final Literata family features two weights and matching italics including more than 1100 characters per font with PanEuropean language support; full Latin Extended, Polytonic Greek (designed by Irene Vlachou with the external advice by Gerry Leonidas) and Cyrillic (designed by Vera Evstafieva with the external consultancy by Kiril Zlatkov).
The new font is apparently live in the Google Play Books app for Android – as well as on the web. TypeTogether has uploaded examples of the new font-face to their Flickr account for the font-nerds to obsess over.
I read a lot of angry comments; maybe this font will make it more enjoyable. I hope.
Google – working on a typeface but they have the worst piracy of any large vendor of ebooks. Get your act together Google, and instead of wasting time and money on a font, spend it on security.
Why has piracy got anything to do with Google? … unless they’re the ones actually pirating the eBooks! Piracy is not a technical issue, DRM is not a solution, it’s annoying impediment that peeves off legitimate users accessing content in a way that is most comfortable to them. Furthermore, DRM is *impossible*, no not a typo, not an exaggeration, literally 100% *impossible*. I don’t know why companies continue to waste time chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The best (i.e. most functional) DRM out there is that of game consoles, and that’s because they own… Read more »
Um, Google Books, also called Google Play? Google are an ebook vendor. And their store is RIFE with pirated material. So it has everything to do with Google and ebooks, and it’s absolutely a technical issue – Amazon and Apple don’t have the same sort of piracy going on with Google ebooks. In response to you car rant – if you bought a hard copy book sure, you could cross out words in it, forever altering the copy you own and therefore making it obviously NOT the original material. Except modifying the original material is pretty ridiculous where art is… Read more »
I wasn’t drawing a comparison between modify cars and modifying books, I was drawing a comparison between cars and game consoles (i.e. hardware I own). I was stating that locking down devices for the sake of DRM is detrimental to society as it unnecessarily limits expression in an attempt to solve a problem that can’t be solved, and more importantly shouldn’t be solved. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a proponent of piracy, I write software for a living and want people buying my software. However, I sure as heck don’t damage the usability of my software because a few… Read more »
So basically you came onto a web page about font in Google EBOOKS, and start ranting about things OTHER than ebooks, like computer games and cars? Nice one. Staying on topic seems to a problem for you. Mix tapes – don’t edit original material. DJs are musicians themselves, not plebeians, and sampling/remixes are an industry standard. Pop art/dada – practices in these art forms specifically concern borrowing and parodying, also these are artists, not plebeians (again). Video game mods – not stand-alone software, so the original content is always necessary to even work; the gaming community runs on a certain… Read more »
You mean like how you came onto a webpage about a font and started ranting about piracy and advocating DRM… Yeah, go figure.
I’m guessing you’ve never heard of mix tapes, DJs, covers, pop art, video game mods and film fan edits. By the way I was never making a point about modifying books in the first place, no idea where you got that from. Nonetheless I can’t see the point in leaving in invalid argument around to confuse others.
I read a lot on my tablet, might give this a go.