The Cantarell typeface family was designed during my study of MA Typeface Design over 2 years in the Department of Typography at the University of Reading (UK). The class of 2009 will have our work published on typefacedesign.org soon.

The typeface is designed as a contemporary Humanist sans serif, and was developed for on-screen reading; in particular, reading web pages on an HTC Dream mobile phone.

That device runs Google Android, and therefore has a web browser supporting the exciting new web fonts feature known as @font-face. As my very first typeface design, the typeface has many faults, yet it achieves the goal of improving readability on this device.

This highlights my motivation for undertaking a study of typeface design: I believe it is essential that when we use digital tools, our freedom to use, understand, modify and share these tools is respected. Otherwise, when the tool does not work in the way that we need, we will be unable to fix it.

These fonts were developed using only such software, mainly FontForge. Typeface designs are tools too, and therefore these font files are licensed in a way that respects your freedom — you are invited to extend them to meet your needs, such as to add the glyphs missing from your own writing systems, under the terms of the Open Font License.