Last year, a discussion took place at the ATypI conference in Barcelona, the participants of which were representatives of several areas of the creative and typographic industries. For a while, the discussion focused on the feature-rich OpenType fonts environment. At this point, a somewhat taken aback Yves Peters sitting in the audience expressed his opposition to such views, stating that not nearly all of the parts of the software offer the level of comfort required by users. Adobe, a key software developer, had not updated its tools for working with fonts and advanced OpenType features for ages, and it’s something a designer can really tell in his daily work. Such was the discussion which had sparked a number of subsequent activities.

During his lecture in Berlin this year, Yves introduced us to, among other things, the history of storing letters and to the actual physical methods of their manipulation and application. And it had never been easy. Be it the Chinese rotating type case or Gutenberg, the typewriter or the computer keyboard of today (or more precisely, the Glyphs palette in Adobe applications, which is paradoxically in its own way reminiscent of a case used for storing letters in Gutenberg times).

Almost a year has passed since the Barcelona conference, and Yves has lost nothing of his drive and enthusiasm to do something about the situation. “If you’re not gonna do anything, anyone won’t do anything” were his own words during his presentation. He’s certainly not alone in his efforts. A working group has been set up, officially named the Adobe Typography Customer Advisory Board. A team with names such as Nadine Chahine, Yves Peters, Nick Sherman, Tobias Frere-Jones, Kris Sowersby, John Hudson. It’s a promising lot. Adobe is extremely forthcoming, contributing a team of their own that is helping to push things forward.

So, it’s quite possible that it’s not merely the Adobe interface that is being transformed. We may be at the crossroads of establishing new standards, which will find their way into future software. New horizons are opening up, not only for the change of the UI for type, but for its whole terminology and all things related to it. Adobe wants to be among those who change the current tools and the work environment of font designers – and that’s an ambitious undertaking. And so in the spirit of Yves’ “if not me then no-one” approach, it’s time to appeal to other developers, in fact to any and all who can contribute to the process, because the future is happening now.