Windows Vista font update

Microsoft has corrected the screenshot (published here) of the new Windows Vista font, Segoe UI. It seems that Jensen Harris published the wrong shot on his blog. The one going around is the old Segoe, not the Vista / Office 12 version.

The image above shows Segoe UI as it will be used in Windows Vista. Here’s the published description of it :

“Segoe UI is a four member typeface family included with Windows Vista and Office 12 for User Interface use. It’s used widely by Windows Vista components but can also be specified by third party apps running on Windows Vista that may wish to take advantage of it in order to have the Windows Vista look and feel. Efforts are underway to enable third party apps running on Windows XP to access the fonts too.

“Each Segoe UI font includes well over 2,200 characters, supporting Unicode 4.1 coverage of Latin, Cyrillic and Greek based languages and includes support for IPA (international phonetic alphabet) and combining diacritics.

“The Segoe fonts are provided as TrueType flavor OpenType fonts, and as such can be used to author regular documents or create graphics, but the fonts themselves have been tuned for use as UI fonts at 8pt, 9pt, and 10pt under the ClearType rendering environment.

“Although the fonts have been optimized for ClearType (the Windows Vista and Windows Presentation Framework default experience), concessions have been made for regular bi-level (black and white or aliased) rendering, or for regular grayscale antialiasing.

“Segoe UI was drawn in the humanist sans-serif style evoking natural, almost hand drawn letter shapes. As a humanist sans design it shares characteristics with Adobe Myriad, Verdana, Corbel, Lucida Sans and the father of the humanist sans movement Frutiger. Unlike Verdana and Frutiger the typeface has a lively true italic, not based on an obliqued or slanted regular style. Also unlike the humanist sans faces designed primarily for print-use the fonts include distinctive letter shapes that help the user distinguish between easily confused characters like lowercase l and uppercase I.

“Finally, Segoe UI is just one part of the extended Segoe family of typefaces. This family also includes contextual cursive handwriting fonts (Segoe Script), a hand drawn non-cursive font (Segoe Print), special fonts for TV use (Segoe TV), a symbol font for hardware decals (Segoe HW) and a fourteen member set used for branding and corporate communications.

“One final note: The original Segoe fonts were not created for or by Microsoft. It was an existing Monotype design which we licensed and extensively extended and customized to meet the requirements of different processes, apps and devices.”

I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.