Uplands
Contributed by Adrien Menard on Mar 18th, 2024. Artwork published in
.
Uplands. License: All Rights Reserved.
Uplands is an immersive digital project that has been designed to celebrate Indigenous Art Centres and share Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artistic and cultural practices with the world.
A meaningful project by Agency using Gravity and Haarlem typefaces.
Design by Studio Ongarato.
Uplands. License: All Rights Reserved.
Uplands. License: All Rights Reserved.
Uplands. License: All Rights Reserved.
Uplands. License: All Rights Reserved.
Uplands. License: All Rights Reserved.
Uplands. License: All Rights Reserved.
Uplands. License: All Rights Reserved.
2 Comments on “Uplands”
Very nice in-use example, but a bit sad that the eng glyph is replaced by a fall-back glyph. Mostly because I can see that the glyph is there in the Haarlem specimen.
Good point, Jan. For context, this is about the letter eng, or ŋ, which appears in the word “Rrambaŋi” as shown in the fourth image. A glyph for this character is indeed included in Haarlem, and this is what it’s supposed to look like:
Unfortunately it assumably fell victim to the scourge that is overly aggressive subsetting. Web developers often reduce the glyph set of fonts by excluding supposedly unnecessary ones, in order to save a few bits. That’s a reasonable thing when a) the font in question is huge in file size and b) you have a very good understanding of which characters won’t appear on the site in question – at the time of implementing the webfont and in the future.
The page in question with all embedded assets “weighs” over 30MB. Subsetting the font shaved off something like 30KB. Congrats, you worsened the looks and the reading experience by making the page 1 per mille lighter!
More often than not, minimizing the language support of your font is foolish, and will bite you in the ass. As it often affects names and terms from “minority languages”, it’s also not very inclusive.
Subsetting can be beneficial for fonts that cover additional writing systems or that have extras like small caps or dingbats – and you know for a fact that those won’t be needed in the given context.
(The irony is not lost on me that the font we’re currently using on Fonts In Use doesn’t include an eng either. But that’s not because of subsetting.)