 Okay, so I'm Steve, this is Miguel, and we're here really excited to talk to you guys about Adobe Type Concepts today, so. Here's a plan. First, we're going to talk about introduction to Adobe Type Concepts, and we're going to get into Vortis, which is our first ATC typeface. And then we're going to talk about releasing Vortis, and finally, well, one more, we'll talk about the reactions to Adobe Type Concepts, and then finally conclusions. Okay, so a little about me. I'm Steve, I work at Adobe. I started there in 2010 or 2011, and I actually work right about there in that location. I'm originally from Nova Scotia, Canada. I got my master's in type design at Reading, and I was brought in to do type development, but I soon started getting into more designing the process of type design, and today I actually work full time as a program manager there on the Typekit team. The type development team is a really great team. It's small, especially compared to the rest of Adobe. As you can see, the Type developer team is pretty small compared to the rest, and one thing to keep in mind there is that the majority of those blue people there all use fonts and need fonts for all their products, so there's lots of demands on our time. Okay, so Adobe's first product was Type. A lot of people don't realize that, and initially we had a whole bunch of releases every year. It's kind of leveled out around 1998, and recently we've been doing a lot more non-Latins than Latins, and Miguel and I were kind of wondering, why is that? And if you look at 0809 there, it wasn't a very productive year. Well, the main reason, one of several, is that typefaces have grown over time. If you look at Adobe Latin 1, which was the default for Type 1, we had 229 glyphs. Adobe Latin 2, 250 glyphs, which is the most basic open-type glyph set. Latin 3, we started adding Polish, Croatian, Hungarian, all the Central European support. Latin 4, added Vietnamese, extended Latin. You see it's getting kind of big there. And then finally, Latin 5 came out, and it's pretty massive. That includes all the IPA phonetics, and a whole bunch of other stuff. So because of our reputation for massive text typefaces, we mainly only do Latin 4. So unfortunately, if we're not going to do a Latin 4 project, it's not really worth doing. So it's a little bit sad, because some great ideas get left out there. So Miguel and I didn't like this. So we started whiteboarding one day a few years ago. It was kind of crazy. In order to do a font, you had to book two to four years development time in advance. Fonts take a long time to make. It's a huge time investment. And what was happening is the fonts were just getting so big that it was even hard to inertia to start a new product. So we started wondering, well, how can we do this? How can we make it work at Adobe with our limited resources? And there's a thing going on at Adobe. Well, it has been for a while called agile development. It's used in software development. It's kind of a methodology for getting work done. I'll talk about that for a second here. The main thing with agile is to release early, release often. The teams will all work in short sprints. And at the end of every short sprint, what they're going to do is release a usable product so users can actually get going. And after that, they will reevaluate the product and the user feedback and start charting what they're going to do next and then repeat it. So we started wondering, well, how can we do this? How can we make agile work with font development? Fonts, in particular, are a really hard thing to divvy up. You wouldn't want to release a font that just had ABC in it, for example. And the answer is that we needed to get some modules to figure out how to divide this up. So lots of things are built in modules, as you know. There's a space station. And that's certainly more complicated than a font. Project Ara, modular cell phone from Google. And houses. That guy looks happy. The question is, how can we start modularizing type design? Okay, I have to talk about project management stuff for a minute here. And it's a little bit dry. So you stay with me. Okay. Projects 101. There's three aspects for any project. Stay with me here. First one's time, resources, and scope. In terms of time, we knew that if we were going to experiment with something, we'd have about six months. And for resources, well, that was simple. We had Miguel. And scope is where it started to get really interesting. So how do we scope typeface? Well, there's three main areas whenever you go to scope a typeface. That's styles, glit set, and the features. And we were kind of estimating and thinking about how we could do this with Miguel's time, basically part time, because he still got other stuff to work on. We figured base style we could get done in about six months. Glit set, we could make a glit set. Glit set addition is a module for about three months worth of work. And the features, we'd be looking at about a month for, say, add small caps or old style figures. Okay. We're done talking about the project management now. Okay. So if you go to release a font in modules, let's see what it looks like. So on the bottom, we've got a timeline there. And let's start here. So you can see we've added the base glit set, and it took about six months. Then we added, you know, beside, we'd add some central European, another three months. How about some small caps up in there, one month. Some Greek. Time's going. Oh, look, we added another style. Something interesting there is, normally, this traditional method, we wouldn't ever dream of releasing fonts without parity in style. But one thing that did happen around the same timeline is we were doing open source fonts, and we were just releasing often. And it seemed that users were happy with that. They were happy to have the fonts earlier. And that's the name in Agile too, release early, release often. So just keep going. You can see you're still adding to the debt there in terms of the style parity. But eventually you get there. So one other way to look at this is comparing traditional method with type concepts method. And keep in mind, with our method, we're releasing new features all along the way, which you'll see with some nice Legos. There we go. So every one of those is a new feature released. And at the end, we still got the same size typeface. The difference is we've been able to focus on parts that people really want, because we're doing listening to feedback. Each of those little dark green bars on the bottom represents a pause and reevaluating before we decide which way to go next. So if you look at those built up Legos, I know which one looks more fun. So in terms of that feedback, let's talk about it. Why bother seeking feedback? Well, feedback equals guidance. Okay, I'm going to show an example here. We're going to go to design space. Get ready. Okay. So here's the options we have. Here's our type designer and his rocket ship. He really wants an awesome typeface to come out of this. Now we're going to show without any guidance. He doesn't want to go down there. And he doesn't want to suck. He wants an awesome typeface. There's our gas gauge. Keep in mind, in this case, it's actually time. He's got a finite amount of time to work on this project. So once he hits go, he's going to burn the whole fuel. That's an unloved typeface. Let's look at design with guidance. All right. So we got our type designer there again. Got the same amount of time to work. Let's do this. Okay, he stops. He just burns a little fuel. He says, hey, hey, how am I doing? Okay, that way. What about now? Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. We're starting to get more awesome. How about now? Oh, yeah. Am I in track? Oh, yeah, good idea. Awesome typeface. Okay. So it's important to remember feedback equals guidance. It's not gospel. The feedback is just there to inform the designer. It's not there to order them around. So some of the feedback you'll get is more useful than others. But after a while, you can start to see a pattern. So in this case, lots of people want Cyrillic. So that might be a good next step for the next stage. So one thing, as someone who studied type design works on the type team, I want to make sure this is understood with Adobe type concepts. That it's not there to suck the designer's soul and just be ordered around. In fact, it's just the opposite. You want to avoid certain situations like this one. So you don't want to spend all that time working on something and find out it's not being used and it's probably not going to be used. So it's going to be efficient. You might say, but hey, don't suck my soul, man. This is important chart. This is the type development fund distribution chart. And this is how it works. So half the stuff in type design is really fun. The other half, not so much. So if you're a type designer, it's important to think about what you're spending your time on because you could be actually spend more time on the blue stuff than that green stuff. So keep that in mind. In the end, what we're looking for is happy users and happy type designer to make it work. So speaking of happy type designers, I'm going to let Miguel take over here. Hi. So Steve introduced me as a type designer, but I'm actually the business side of this, as you can tell by the outfit. Okay, wait, wait, wait. I can do this. Okay. So Steve talked about the program. And now I'd like to introduce to you the first design we released, Vortis. Okay. One of my inspirations for Vortis was something that I actually saw, that they occasionally saw growing up in Portugal. An advertising for fertilizer, for a fertilizer brand from the 1930s, which can still be found today in villages and the rural areas, often by the side of the road. As a kid, I never stopped to think why I was so attracted to it. But there was something in it that I would get, it would get my attention every time I saw it. One of these, because there are many across the country. The name, which says fertilizer from Chile today. And the cowboy silhouette were definitely two elements that sparked my imagination. I would look at them and picture a caravan of ranchers riding behind him with a load of fertilizer all the way from Chile to Portugal. I was a kid. So it was only much, much later in college when I got to study graphic arts that I learned and learned the meaning of graphic design that understood what made this science so engaging to me. The silhouette, it's the arrangement, it's the contrasting colors, but above all, it's the lettering. An art deco geometric sense. It's simple, sturdy design. It's just mesmerizing. It brings the whole piece together and makes it so effective graphically. And it stands out in the landscape where these would be normally found. And this stuck with me. Now, several years, fast forward several years, I went to Germany for one semester as part of an exchange student program. And there I discovered the magazine dedicated to graphic design, illustration, photography called page. I didn't know enough of German to read it, but I enjoyed it because it was well designed and I could get a lot of information from the pictures alone. And in particular, one thing that I loved about it was the magazine's logo. So the P and the E are pretty simple, non-descript, but the A and the G are quite peculiar. At first, they don't seem to belong together, but these two elements add interest and to the word mark and make it unique. And as I was drawn to these two letters and with the nitrate at the back of my mind, I started wondering, what would the whole alphabet look like? So I started sketching. These are kind of bad. I mean, they were done 2004 just before I went to reading to study typeface design. And at the time, I was probably thinking that this would be my project. But as some of you know, the students there are encouraged to design text typefaces, not display typefaces. And that's what I ended up doing. So this sketchbook just sat closed on a shelf for almost a decade until I realized it could be a good fit for this new program that we were introducing. And so I resumed sketching. Hopefully this time a little bit more skill. And a bit more. And the result was this, Bortus concept. I'm very happy with it. I feel like the design captures the ideas that I have been brewing in the back of my mind for all these years. And by the way, this is the whole font. The whole glyph set is shown here. One particular thing, a little side note to mention that the name Bortus is the Portuguese word for vortex, which is something that always came to my mind every time I looked at this letter. All the tornadoes and all that stuff that we hear about news. So as Steve explained earlier, one of the goals of the ATC program is to start with a concept project and grow it over time. So in terms of scope, I had to decide which glyphs to include in the initial font. And for that, I looked at how foundry type and wood type was and still is commercialized in North America. This page from the Adobe Type Founders catalog, we can see an area that displays the complete character set. And this became the base for Bortus' glyph set. For this first release, I decided not to design a lowercase, but that's something that may change. And now back to Steve. All right. So the first thing we had to think about when we went to release it is it's going to be paid or unpaid release. And we kind of waffled back and forth on this. Lots of discussions. In the end, though, we decided to go with unpaid. So the reason for this is that, well, firstly, it's this method best aligned with our goals. So the project goals in this case were firstly to make a great typeface. So make sure we're seeking, receiving lots of feedback and to have a full great user experience from start to finish. So especially the second point, seeking, receiving feedback, we thought in this case, since that was one of our biggest goals, we'd get better results if we went unpaid. Now, in terms of getting the font out, we had a couple options. Now, most of our fonts up to that point primarily were sold as OTF files on our Adobe Type Store, selling perpetual fonts. However, we also had Typekit, which was serving our web fonts. And we started thinking about, well, what about just making this Typekit exclusive? So we talked about the various methods. And in the end, we decided to go Typekit exclusive. So why is that? Well, it's better for us. At Adobe, it's easier for us to release. We can release faster, much less overhead with their method. We really believe it's a better experience for the users as well when it comes to finding, acquiring, using the fonts. And another bonus is then we could have our desktop and web fonts all in one location. Bless you. When it came to branding, we had to think about how we're going to position this with our current offering. So we already had Adobe Originals, which was an established brand at Adobe, mainly heavy text families. So we need to set the expectations right up front. One thing is that we wanted people to understand that the type design is the same high quality, but the initial scope and user involvement is very different. So we need to set them apart. So that's where we started going with Adobe Type Concepts. This is a logo we had our Typekit designer, LAJ stocks come up with, and the idea is to communicate the quality of Adobe Originals, but more of a work in progress kind of thing. All right. So in terms of naming, Miguel had chose a really great name. We all like that. But we wanted to somehow think ahead and make sure we were distinguishing the initial release of this, in case later on it became a full family. So what we opted to do is go with tagging concept on the end as a suffix just for the first version. So when it came to collecting that feedback, this was kind of a new thing for us. We weren't really sure how to do it, because we had never really actively pursued this kind of thing before. So when we looked at the methods out there, we thought about Twitter, email, feedback forms, user forums. But in the end, what we ended up choosing the primary vehicle was Behance, which might be surprising, but some good reasons for that. In terms of Behance is a feedback solution. It's a creative social network. It's already got an established fairly knowledgeable design community. There's easy integration for commenting, liking, and following, which is all stuff that we wanted. And as a bonus, it's a really great tool for showcasing work. It's got great portfolio set up for displays. We had to get the word out when we did this release. We, well, Nicole, our marketing person did a great job organizing a bunch of synchronized tweets. We had the Behance page launch. We did a really great article on the Typekit blog that gets a lot of traffic. And then we also did, this may look familiar if you've been through your goodie bags, printed sketchbook, might want to hold onto those. We found a guy this week selling his for $15 in Japan. And yeah, that's about it. The font went out and I'll let Miguel take over. How did people react? So on Twitter, we got these nice reactions to the program and to the typeface itself. They're very positive and encouraging. And here are a few more of them. This one's probably my favorite. Thank you, Grant. So the feedback also came through our blog and Behance. And it didn't come in the volume that we were hoping, but it was fairly helpful and adequate given how new this whole program is to us and to our audience. So, okay, now that the concept font is out, what's next? What's in it for Fortis? Well, one nice aspect of this typeface is that it has a great growth potential. And the feedback we've gotten has validated the expectations that we had that people want to see more. I mean, they want to see more widths, more widths, more styles, perhaps, a lowercase, more scripts. And I personally want all of that too. And I can tell you that work is already underway in one of these areas. I'm just not going to say which one. So hold on there. And by the way, this is, for those not familiar with it, this is the IEAP, the first letter of the Armenian alphabet. So what else? I mean, one thing about tech concepts is that it's more than just Fortis. Fortis is just the beginning. We have other projects and ideas in development. And you'll hear more about them in the near future. All I can say at this point is that the next tech concept is going to explore the newest font technology. And in conclusion, there are several other things that we had to leave out from this presentation, but we're happy to get your questions. For those of you that had a longer lunch, here's the TLBR version of our presentation. So Adobe Tech Concepts is a new way to make and release fonts in modules with decisions informed by the user feedback. The benefits of doing that, well, users get the fonts sooner rather than later, and the designers can get feedback along the way. Also, it allows users to be involved in the process. And this all kind of fits together. And it allows us for designers to really focus on what or really align what they want and what the users want. And so just to wrap up, the three things for you to take away from this presentation if you just want three. So Adobe Tech Concepts is a new approach. There are more projects on the way. And by the way, one thing that needs to be clear is that ATC is not meant to replace our traditional method. It's just a way to complement it. And most importantly, we want your feedback. That's it. Thank you.