Getting mobile type right
or…
textual healing
Julie Strawson
Future of Mobile Nov 14 2007, London

Has your text got
style?

In the PC world
Scalable fonts bring style, colour and variety

The mobile world
• Our font choices… normal, bold and
large

The mobile world
• We have normal italic, bold italic & large italic

Future of mobile text
• Imagine if we could move the desktop world into the
mobile world…

About Monotype Imaging
We’re a leading global provider of text imaging solutions
– We enable text that connects!

Global customers & partners
World Class Customers and Partners Across All Sectors

Rich design heritage

Global expertise
We employ 200+ people worldwide and have offices close to customers and partners

How do you measure text performance?
Text Performs When…
– It overcomes barriers in language or technology
– It makes products more useful and more powerful
– It makes markets easier to penetrate
– It makes brands more memorable
– It makes user experiences truly enhanced
– It makes manufacturing easier to scale
– It makes engineering costs lower and more widely leveraged

Displaying scalable fonts on mobile
• Significant challenges
– Legibility and consistency across displays
– Text layout (height restriction)
– Memory footprint
– Clear display of East Asian characters (CJK)
– Support for multiple languages simultaneously

Monotype Imaging in the mobile environment

Helping to build global standards

Monotype Imaging mobile solution
You need to …
• ensure clarity and readability at any size
• broaden choice of typefaces
• reflect brands through fonts
• serve global markets
®
ESQ Mobile fonts
• Latin-based
• Japanese
• Devanagari
• Many more

A closer look: scalability
• Bitmaps not required
• One font per typeface design

A closer look: on-screen text fidelity
• Characters need to fit in a defined space
• Not all TrueType fonts work well in mobile
®
Fonts in a Box technology keeps scaled text sized to fit within an em square
™

A closer look: intricately shaped East Asian text
• East Asian text needs to remain clear
• At small sizes, intricate shapes can blur
SmartHint technology keeps East Asian text scaled to small sizes clear and readable
™

A closer look: layout of complex scripts
Complex scripts are unique
WorldType Layout Engine handles layout requirements of multiple languages
®

Monotype Imaging’s ESQ Mobile Fonts ®
A collection of optimised fonts for mobile
• height-restricted: all characters fit within the em square

The right fonts can…
The right fonts can…

make user interfaces more readable…
before after

Reflect your audience…
before after

lend personality to UIs…
before after

evoke emotion…

personalise content…

support global content…

reinforce brand identity…

Taking brands mobile

Resources
• White Paper
Bringing Typography to Mobile in Symbian OS
http://developer.symbian.com/main/downloads/paper
s/monotype/Symbian_WP_screen.pdf
• SDK / evaluation or just like to talk more about text?
jl.strawson@monotypeimaging.co.uk
www.monotypeimaging.com
• Typefaces illustrated by Sebastian Lester – excerpts
from ‘Moving Type’
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nOiNG2TCe
XQ