Gilbert Baker honored with Google Doodle!

[Former Member]

It would have been his 66th birthday.

NewFest and NYC Pride partnered to design a new font in his honor. You can download the beta preview.

[Dodger]

I like the font; it's a nice tribute to an interesting and colourful character. I prefer the original 8 coloured flag to the standard 6 colours that are always used now, but all credit to the guy for not trademarking it.

[Former Member]

The biggest problem with the font is that it exploits a font technology that isn’t supported by most software. Notably, Adobe painting program (bitmapped), Photoshop, supports it, but not Adobe’s own desktop publishing software, Indesign, or drawing software (vector graphics, which traditionally has better supported text and fonts), Illustrator. Only a couple other apps support it, but not any of the less expensive consumer-oriented apps.

 

San Francisco’s Harvey Milk Plaza (aka the exit from the Muni Metro's Castro Station) flies a huge 8-stripe Rainbow Flag at the intersection of Castro Street and Market Street. But the Rainbow Crosswalks at 18th Street and Castro Street, as well as all the Rainbow Banners lining Market Street and Castro Street, have only the more common six colors.

[Former Member]

There are several new competing color font technologies which, as usual, are incompatible. This always make adoption difficult since font creators are reluctant to develop fonts for multiple formats – and later face the choice of disappointing customers or later giving away the font in the eventual standard after having spent the resources to revise it.

 

There are fonts that come in multiple parts that let you layer parts in different colors to achieve a similar effect, but that also requires software that allows you to do that. A standard word processor isn’t designed to do that. Drawing applications generally would. I’ve never actually tried it myself. Hmmm. Now you’ve made me want to try…

[Dodger]

I suppose the colours are important with this font considering it's a tribute to Gilbert Baker but the font would stand up on its own and there's no reason why they can't do a vector version. You're right though, they are reluctant to develop anything for multiple formats.

[Former Member]

If you download the font, it does function just like any other solid color font. So if you like it, it’s free to download. (But don’t ask me where to put it on a PC.)

 

Font creators had to deal with the Postscript vs TrueType font divide. This mostly went away with OpenType font technology which incorporated both of the competing technologies. These new technologies are proposed extensions to OpenType.

 

Since the major current Operating Systems support OpenType, your computer can handle Postscript, TrueType, and OpenType fonts.

[AC Benus]

I like the font because it has a strong dialogue with what would have been popular at the time Gilbert designed the rainbow flag. Too bad about the color technology though  

[Former Member]

It’ll get sorted out eventually. All the major players have their favorites, but they also have an incentive to cooperate to make this more widespread.