 Hei, wrth gwrs. I'm Vernon Adams. I mostly work designing Libre typefaces, Libre wetforms. So I'm going to talk about freedom as a technical aspect of type design. So this is a quote from Emil Ruder as the prominent Swiss graphic designer and typographer, who is one of the main components of the Swiss style, the modernist 20th century style. It's a quote from him, a classic modernist statement. Typography has one plain duty before it, and that is to convey information in writing. A printed work, which cannot be read, becomes a product without purpose. And I'm suggesting that if we take that logic into the present day, that actually Libre fonts are the most fit for purpose fonts for type setting, the kind of information and content that we're seeing more and more on the web today. So I'm suggesting that freedom has become a technical aspect of font design and that freedom of movement for a font is now just as important as qualities such as legibility, language support, cross-platform compatibility. So the kind of the big key to all this is the idea of real active text and how that is presented or how we deal with that on the internet. The idea of real active text is it's the actual text you have on the web as opposed to text presented as a bitmap image. And real text is becoming the kind of real key of the web. And why is that? For start it uses little bandwidth so it's incredibly fast compared to bitmap images and flash presentations, all this sort of thing. Real text can be searched, can be indexed, cached, mined and tagged, can be easily shared, copied, distributed, redistributed. Real text can be scaled without loss of resolution whereas a bitmap image, once you've said it in the bitmap that's it, you've got it there. Real text can be scaled. Real text can be styled dynamically using stylesheets and real text can be themed again using stylesheets. Perhaps most importantly people today are producing a lot of textual content. The solution to this came in the CSS3 standard which was a CSS rule called atFontFace. And you're probably very familiar with this. And you're probably also familiar with how it worked. So with this rule you could simply upload a real font to the web. You could call to that font from a stylesheet and you could render the text on any reader who was looking at this page, could render that text with that single font file, which was an amazing, actually simple but it was an alleluia moment for web designers, actually for everybody. But there was of course a big problem with that in that proprietary licensing was designed. Basically it was a license for single or multiple users, but not multiple users as in like everybody who was reading the page. And also font licensing, proprietary licensing very often did not allow this kind of embedding of a font in a document which atFontFace did. So quite simply a proprietary font uploaded to a web server also became easily downloaded by anyone who had no license to use that font. And as we all can imagine that was a huge problem for proprietary foundries. And that's kind of got worse over the last few years because what we're seeing more and more on the web as opposed to before when you went out and bought a book you were kind of like a passive reader. More and more everyone is becoming a publisher. Everyone is a writer, a blogger. It's like everyone has a website and everyone has readers. We all need fonts whereas before fonts were tools for professionals. Now we actually, we all need fonts. And so my response to this situation has been one example I'm going to look at is a font I designed called Oswald. So Oswald, I designed pretty much from the ground up to be a free, very easily distributed, easy to use and popular typeface. And at the time I was looking at, there's a woman from Southern California University, Joanna Blackley, who she works with media and culture and she often blogs, talks about how fashion and free culture interconnect. And this is a quote from her. She's suggesting that the way fashion works can be a lesson for the way free culture and culture in general should work more. So the idea is in fashion there's, it's acceptable to copy because there's no copyright, very little copyright in fashion. And actually that's the same with fonts. You cannot, in many, especially in the US, you cannot copyright letters, fonts. So this is her, these are kind of four virtues for her for copying in fashion design. It's democratising, it establishes trends faster, it creates an incentive to create new trends and it accelerates creative innovation. I should point out, when she's using the word copying, she's not talking about counterfeiting, she's talking about that very, what is actually very natural thing we do where we look at something which is popular and we sort of say, ah, that's something I can do too. This is what she means by copying. So with Oswald, I can see this from the ground up as a, what I would see as a very popular design. So it comes from the classic kind of 20th century Gothic sans serif faces. And I used a number of old faces from the early 20th century and sort of kind of mash them together in a way and redesign them. And there was actually a lot of design work going on in making this design suitable for the web. And one of the targets I saw was, for example, this whole phenomena which was starting up which was themes for things like WordPress. And I think Oswald, I put it together in like a week and it was Google put it up on the servers. Very quickly we started to, it got used a lot. I started to get feedback. So over a sort of like 12 month period, first sort of 12 months, its development was very much this sort of release early release often. So as feedback came, it got improved, got fixes and it got used a lot for this sort of stuff. I mean it also got picked up by the, it kind of, this was interesting for me, picked up by the Occupy movement to, as part of their sort of free toolkit, they gave out to people to make posters, which was kind of interesting. And that led me to think, well I can push this further. So this is what I actually created for the Occupy design group which was designed so they could make posters. And I sort of introduced, we started, as its popularity was obvious, we introduced new weights so we had a sort of bold and then a lighter. And that kind of accelerated its adoption and usage. So as of now, I think this is the last seven days, these are the stats for Oswald just from Google because you can now, there's several other ways to use Oswald, other servers. But this is the Google stats for the last seven days. So these are individual API pools. So Oswald gets pooled like 100 million times a day. So this is like a, yeah, almost. This is like a seven day stat, which is pretty huge. It's like the second most used web font. I think OpenSans is the most used. Oswald is the second most. And so building on that, the next few months I'm going to be bringing more improvements, more weights, Cyrillic support and probably expanded and condensed versions as well. And the point of that is that what's nice for me is this is how I conceived it. I conceived this from the start to be a very free, easy to use and popular face. And that's what it's become. Thank you very much. Thank you, Vernon. And we have like five minutes for questions first there. So I wanted to ask the notion that freeness is a technical part of design. When I hear that coming from the free software world, I think of the four freedoms that the FSF defines. And redistribution is clear how that, how freeness impacts that. And I guess the freedom to use it, which is obvious, the freedom to change it or modify it, study it and share your changes. So I guess the feedback that you get from people would probably fall under the share your changes kinds of things. I'm curious though if you've seen people actually modify Oswald and publish their own versions of that. I'm not sure there's been other versions published, but actually that's quite rare for Libre fonts anyway. Unfortunately it's not something that happens a lot. What I have had is people submitting, for example Greek or some Cyrillic character sets. And obviously just fixes or suggestions for improvements and stuff like that. The other thing that I was going to ask is on the freedom to study it, which is one of the ones that the FSF defines, is how do you see freeness or other ways as a designer you can make a font easier for people to study and learn from? Yeah, definitely. Well I think as much of the source material, whether that's files, sources, for example specimen pages that you use to study or to scan, et cetera, as much as possible makes it easier. I mean that's something I try and do as much as time permits. But others don't. Others simply make source files available. Thanks. Another question. I would like you to answer this. I'm not really worried about this myself, but the argument we hear a lot, of course with type design moving into Libra, especially moving into the web, is how then will the type industry and individual type designers make a living? Can you tell us a bit of how you survive giving your fonts for free? How I survive or how a designer survives. You yourself. Well I think, well I survive by a mixture of being paid to make Libra fonts, for example from Google, doing custom work, often customising Libra fonts for people who want an extra weight and they're often prepared to pay me to make that way. But actually that, I'm not sure that there's a huge difference in terms of making a living between people who aspire to make Libra fonts and people who aspire to sell their fonts. It's equally, you know, there's a lot of people who aspire to sell their fonts who don't sell them, for example. And I often think that they could make more money by making Libra fonts. There's evidence that that's probably true. And actually that's probably, you know, you see that now, even the larger foundries are having to respond to this by making free fonts because it simply keeps them in the spotlight, keeps them in the market. I guess I would say that you survived by getting your product out there. We do have another question. The last one I'm afraid. OK. So with your fonts, do you declare a reserved font name and require people to change the names? Sorry? If I make a different version of Oswald, can I call it Oswald 2? Good question. I'd probably ask you that, Dave, if so. I think that's, yeah, we've kind of, we've talked about this, you know, how far are people prepared to go making stuff. I'm someone who's, I have a very loose relationship to my work. So I'm kind of, if people are using Libre fonts freely and they're using the work in that way, then I'm happy for people to do pretty much any, you know, whatever they want. I think that if it was commercial, proprietary foundries taking this and trying to privatise it, then that would be an issue. But, yeah, the font name is, you know, that comes under the licensing. So I'm not sure how the open font licence is with the licensing name. Do you know that, Dave? Is that a trick question? Tell us. It is. That's what I said, isn't it? Do I take the option? Yeah, I'm happy for people to take Osworld and make an Osworld too or whatever from it. So thanks, we'll have to go on. The next speaker, thank you, Vernon.