Announcement of the development of a new generation of Georgia and Verdana fonts

Corporation Ascender, Carter & Cone and The Font Bureau, Inc., in collaboration with Microsoft, announced a project to develop headsets for the Georgia and Verdana family. This project started more than a year ago and the first headsets are expected in the first quarter of 2010.

Initially, the Georgia and Verdana family headsets were introduced by Microsoft for on-screen display. Designed by Matthew Carter and Tom Rickner (an Ascender collaborator who completed all the hinting work), these fonts were released in 1996 in the Core fonts for the Web font set, and later came with an addition to Internet Explorer 4.0.


Today, the Georgia and Verdana headset families are some of the most common typefaces. Both Georgia and Verdana provided the necessary clarity of display at the most necessary moment - during the explosive growth of the Internet. Their clear design successfully coped with the task of improving perception when reading content and mail online or in print.

Each family contains large x-heights, open letter counts, high contrast between regular and bold styles, ample spacing, and a design that allows you to distinguish between different shapes of characters. Fonts contain comprehensive hinting to improve rendering of both small and large font sizes in Microsoft Windows and are designed to support the full European character set (WGL Pan-European character).

A project by Ascender, Carter & Cone, and the Font Bureau aims to optimize Verdana and Georgia fonts for many applications, including advanced text formatting capabilities on web sites and printing. The Georgia / Verdana project will provide the following improvements for these fonts:

* new styles (weights and widths) in addition to the four existing for each family;
* extended character set;
* improved kerning;
* New typography features of OpenType for improved typography.

“Verdana and Georgia were proposed by Microsoft as a solution for simple screen font tasks: sanserif and serif in regular, bold, and italics, designed for maximum readability,” says Matthew Carter of Carter & Cone Type Inc. “New additions to font families are natural and time-driven progress. "These innovations offer a wider range of typographic capabilities, both for display on the screen and when printing, while at the same time maintaining compatibility with the original versions."

“The extended and improved Georgia and Verdana families will appeal to many print and online publishers,” said David Berlow, one of the founders of The Font Bureau. “These changes will expand the boundaries of creativity for professionals for whom these font families were previously the main workhorses,” added David.

“Georgia and Verdana paved the way for screen readers,” said Ira Mirochnick, president of Ascender Corporation. “We now have an unprecedented opportunity to bring together design and development teams consisting of Matthew Carter, David Burlow, Steve Matteson and Tom Rickner to improve these special fonts. Their work will offer everyone, from Microsoft Office users to professional designers, an excellent set of additional fonts that we believe will make the Georgia and Verdana families even more widely used today. ”

“We expect the Georgia and Verdana families to live for a long time,” said Simon Daniels, Lead Font Support Manager at Microsoft, “and we are very excited to be able to build these great fonts with Ascender, Carter & Cone and The Font Bureau. Soon, these fonts will be available to our users. ”