Love it or hate it, you may be seeing more of Roboto, Android’s signature font, in the coming weeks and months. Google’s engineers have created a new toolchain to produce the font—based completely on open source software, says Google—and uploaded it to GitHub, allowing anyone to download it and use it as they see fit.
Introduced with Ice Cream Sandwich, Roboto has been Android’s go-to font since 2011. Designed by Christian Roberston, one of the company’s many talented designers, the font has since made its way into Chrome OS and, more recently, Youtube. The font has also become an integral part of Google’s Material Design guideline.
As a part of this initiative, the company has updated the font to include all Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters. In doing so, Google has tripled the number of glyphs provided by Roboto; there are now more than 40,000 that developers can utilize.
According to Google, the open sourcing of Roboto was a collaborative project between its Material Design, Internationalization Engineering, Google Fonts and Android teams.
Somewhere Matías Duarte is wearing an egregiously colourful shirt to celebrate the milestone.
[source]Google[/source]
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