Google has always had a taste for creating and using their own fonts, Roboto is possibly the most well known and now there’s another to add to the list – Literata – the new font being used in Google Play Books.
Announcing the update on Twitter, the update has been advertised earlier this month in a blog post from font design company Type Together.
Introducing Google Play Books' new font, Literata. Perfect for long reads on all devices. https://t.co/VQfT6oZvVU pic.twitter.com/eF3B1MJpkX
— Google Play (@GooglePlay) May 18, 2015
Veronika Burian and José Scaglione from TypeTogether, lead their own team in co-operation with a team at Google, lead by senior UX designer Addy Lee Beavers to creat a new font that will:
provide an outstanding reading experience on a whole range of devices and high resolution screens running different rendering technologies. Additionally, the new Play Books type is meant to establish a recognisable visual identity for Google’s native eBook App and stylistically distinguish itself from other eReader competitors.
The new description of the new font i:
TypeTogether arrived at a solution of hybridisation taking inspiration from both Scotch and old-style Roman types. The resulting letterforms create a pleasant organic texture that helps to deliver very good results for ease of reading and comfort.
The secondary style is an upright italic, meaning that the letter shapes have an italicised construction and& no slant to speak of. Albeit rather uncommon in screen-fonts, this kind of genre addresses some of the inherent limitations of the square pixel grid. Moreover the resulting unusual italic adds high branding value to Literata making it unique, recognisable and easy to remember.
The final Literata family features two weights and matching italics including more than 1100 characters per font with PanEuropean language support; full Latin Extended, Polytonic Greek (designed by Irene Vlachou with the external advice by Gerry Leonidas) and Cyrillic (designed by Vera Evstafieva with the external consultancy by Kiril Zlatkov).
The new font is apparently live in the Google Play Books app for Android – as well as on the web. TypeTogether has uploaded examples of the new font-face to their Flickr account for the font-nerds to obsess over.
[pb-app-box pname=’com.google.android.apps.books’ name=’Google Play Books’ theme=’discover’ lang=’en’]
