Skype Icon Font - James Bowman

Company:

Microsoft

Year:

2012

Duration:

2 Months

Overview

The Skype icon library had grown to be over 300 strong and managing changes across multiple platforms was proving tricky, with fragmentation starting to occur. To tackle this, in anticipation of the Windows 8 release, I took on the challenge of creating a font containing every icon. It sounded simple enough. There were tools that could automate this kind of thing, right? SVGs in one end, .ttf, .otf, .woff out of the other...

Problem

And yes, there were tools, but the quality of output from all of them at the time was rather poor and certainly wouldn't be good enough for us. So I ended up diving into the weird and wonderful world of OpenType tables, font hinting and a bunch of tools that felt like they hadn't been updated since the 90s.

Solution

I contacted the Microsoft font team in Redmond for advice, and they confirmed my fears. A majority of the Illustrator artwork would have to be modified to some degree to make the contours more suitable for TrueType hinting, a process where instructions are added to vertices to ensure the glyphs render nicely at smaller sizes. They put me in touch with Mike Duggan, who is not only a legendary font hinting expert, having worked with the likes of great type designers such as Hermann Zapf, Matthew Carter and Bruno Maag, but was also one of the inventors of ClearType sub-pixel rendering technology. Mike spent two intense days teaching me as much as he could about font hinting.

Result

Two months later, there was a completed icon font that shipped with the launch of the Windows 8 Skype client, and survived Microsoft's rigorous testing and signing process. The same font was rolled out to all clients and web over the following year.