National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior HFC onMEDIA March / April | 2006 Issue 11 In This Issue Typography that is distinc- tive, easy to read, and used Introducing consistently is an important OpenType component of NPS graphic Fonts identity. One of several new 2 signs at Lyndon B. Johnson NHP (pictured here with the one it replaces above) shows how NPS standard typefaces Why Frutiger & (Frutiger and NPS Rawlinson) NPS Rawlinson can be used to identify an 3 important park facility. Sharing Frutiger & NPS 5 Rawlinson From the Director The NPS Uniform Like our colleagues across the Service, Harpers Ferry Center has been challenged by Collection tight budgets and a smaller staff . One way we have dealt with this situation is to provide 6 park and program staff with better tools and timely training to meet their own interpre- Call for Career Collections tive media needs. The National Park Service Graphic Identity Program, managed by the HFC Offi ce of NPS Identity, is an excellent example of a service we continue to provide to the Park Service community. Launched in 2001, the program has developed graphic standards that help establish a unique organizational identity expressed through the full range of communication materials used by the National Park Service. Today, this program is expressed through such diverse media as park publications, news releases, wayside exhibits, websites, audiovisual programs, and even highway signs. In this issue of HFC onMEDIA, we announce the release of new OpenType® versions of the NPS typefaces Adobe Frutiger and NPS Rawlinson—key components of the NPS Graphic Identity Program. These typefaces represent our best eff orts to continue providing up- to-date tools for the everyday work we all do in communicating our programs, services, and essential mission. onMEDIA National Park Service 1 HFC onMEDIA is produced Introducing OpenType Fonts and published by Harpers Ferry The Next Level of Digital Typography Center. Statements of facts and views are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily NPS employees who produce newsletters, news releases, rack refl ect an opinion or an endorse- ment by the National Park cards, reports, site bulletins, and other forms of print commu- Service. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not nications and interpretive media have probably used the NPS- necessarily constitute recommen- approved typefaces Adobe Frutiger and NPS Rawlinson. dation for use by the National Park Service. These typefaces, selected by the HFC The landscape for digital typography has Send questions and comments to Gary Candelaria either by email Offi ce of NPS Identity in 2001, have been thankfully improved over the past fi ve at [email protected] or widely used and distributed across the years. GIS applications now recognize call 304 535 6058. National Park Service community (see PostScript Type 1 fonts. Windows-PC Secretary of the Interior sidebar Why Frutiger and NPS Rawlin- printer drivers translate PostScript as Gale A. Norton son, page 3). They are an integral part of fl uently as TrueType. Even Microsoft’s Director, graphic design standards proscribed in own offi ce applications treat PostScript National Park Service Director’s Order 52A to bring a consistent and TrueType fonts alike. Still, many NPS Fran P. Mainella look to our public communications. users across the country—including the Associate Director, designers at Harpers Ferry Center—saw Partnerships, Interpretation The Trouble with PostScript room for improvement. “Bugs” in the and Education, Volunteers, The adoption of these typefaces, unfor- display of NPS Rawlinson fonts emerged and Outdoor Recreation Chris Jarvi tunately, was accompanied by a variety as Windows 2000 and Windows XP were of technical problems. The approved adopted across the Service (see fi gure 1 Director, versions of Adobe Frutiger and NPS below). Type selection menus in the new Harpers Ferry Center Gary Candelaria Rawlinson were PostScript Type 1 fonts, Adobe Creative Suite applications (Illus- a standard recognized by the profes- trator CS, InDesign CS, and Photoshop Editor David T. Gilbert sional desktop publishing community and CS) wouldn’t display all the NPS Rawl- commercial printing industry—including inson font variants properly. Files shared Art Director Robert Clark, most HFC IDIQ contractors and GPO between MacOS and Windows-PC Offi ce of NPS Identity print vendors. However in 2001, many computers periodically resulted in font NPS offi ces lacked desktop laser printers matching errors. And choosing when Designer David T. Gilbert that supported the PostScript page de- to use old style numbers and tabular scription language. GIS staff and NPS sign numbers added typographic confusion Contributors shops also reported that their core soft- to many workfl ows. Chad Beale Sylvia Frye ware applications recognized TrueType Jane Merritt Fonts—a competing and widely distrib- Introducing OpenType Mark Muse uted alternative to Type 1 developed by Anyone working in the world of graphic Phil Musselwhite Tom Patterson Microsoft—but not PostScript. design and print has most likely heard of The National Park Service cares for special places saved by the American people so that all may experience our heritage. Figure 1. Among the problems with the PostScript Type 1 versions of NPS Rawlinson were too much spacing after a dash in a sentence, a height difference between an “en” dash and an “em” dash, and EXPERIENCE YOUR AMERICA™ an oldstyle 1 that looked more like the capital letter “I”. These problems have all been addressed in the new OpenType versions of NPS Rawlinson. onMEDIA March / April 2006 National Park Service 2 OpenType. OpenType isn’t really a new OpenType Frutiger and Why Frutiger and font format, but rather a hybrid of exist- NPS Rawlinson NPS Rawlinson? ing formats. Developed jointly by Micro- In the fall of 2005, Harpers Ferry Cen- In 2000, a team drawn from soft and Adobe, it combines the outline, ter decided to embrace OpenType. A the National Park Service, metric, and bitmap data in Adobe’s workgroup comprised of HFC managers, National Park Foundation, and Ogilvy Public Relations found PostScript Type 1 format with Microsoft’s visual information specialists, informa- that among the barriers to a TrueType format to form one compact tion technology specialists, and contract greater public understanding of font fi le. The two main benefi ts of the specialists revised the NPS licensing the breadth and depth of our OpenType format are its cross-platform agreement for Adobe Frutiger to include agency was a lack of consistency in the content and appearance compatibility (the same font fi le works the OpenType version of this font. James of visual materials presented on MacOS and Windows-PC computers), Montalbano, the original creator of to the public. Consequently, and its ability to support widely expanded Rawlinson, was contracted to revise and Harpers Ferry Center was tasked to develop graphic standards character sets and layout features, which convert NPS Rawlinson to OpenType. that would establish a unique provide richer linguistic support and After extensive testing on Windows-PC organizational identity that advanced typographic control. and MacOS computers in January and could be expressed through the February 2006, these new typefaces have full range of communication materials used by the National Based on Unicode—an international fi nally been made available Servicewide. Park Service. multi-byte character encoding that covers (See sidebar Sharing Frutiger and NPS virtually all of the world’s languages— Rawlinson, page 5, for download infor- A clear and strong graphic identity for an organization OpenType fonts can make multilingual mation and use restrictions). is achieved through a careful typography easier by including multiple mix of visual elements. These language character sets in one font. Uni- The OpenType version of Adobe Frutiger typically include a logo (the Ar- rowhead), a limited palette of code supports up to 65,000 glyphs in a is comprised of virtually the same char- colors, a limited set of typefaces single font fi le (a glyph is a visual repre- acter set as the PostScript Type 1 ver- (usually a serif and sans serif sentation of a character). By comparison, sion. Although it lacks the rich extended typeface), and a number of dis- a typical PostScript Type 1 font comprised glyphs that Unicode encoding makes tinctive graphic devices (like the black band), all carefully orches- of ISO-Latin encodings used in the West possible, it has the major advantage of trated to achieve a distinctive is limited to 256 glyphs. cross-platform portability. Best of all, look. None of these elements the National Park Service incurs no cost alone can create a strong iden- In OpenType, a letter or number may be for upgrading from the PostScript to tity. But when used together, the combination serves to create a represented by more than one character, OpenType version of Adobe Frutiger: visual impression (both con- or glyph. The numeral “1”, for instance, if an NPS user who already has Adobe sciously and subconsciously) that might be displayed as a tabular character Frutiger downloads the OpenType ver- is unique to that organization. ( 1 ), an old style character ( 1 ), a numera- sion, it still counts as one user license. Typography is one important tor for a fraction ( ½ ), or a way to bind together such superscript character ( 1 ) disparate media as printed ma- terials, fi lms and videos, indoor (see fi gure 2). These extend- and outdoor exhibits, vehicle ed characters are typically markings, uniforms, and signs. accessed from the Symbols Road signs, for instance, are one palette in Microsoft Word of the most pervasive ways the Park Service communicates with or from the Glyphs palette park visitors. Finding typefaces in Adobe InDesign CS. that work effectively in all of these media types was no easy Figure 2. The Glyphs palette in task.