Fabula

The project

Fabula is a project about the design of bilingual web-based story-books for children.

Fabula includes partners in Ireland, Spain, Holland and in the UK at the University of Brighton. Our co-partner at Reading is the Reading and Language Information Centre. The project brings together expertise in language learning, translation, human computer interaction and design for screens.

The Fabula typeface

One of the responsibilities of the Fabula team in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication was to design the screen font for the presentation of Fabula story books on screen. In defining the criteria for this font we took into account the range of characters needed as well as stylistic qualities.

Character set

The range of characters available in the font must display all the Fabula languages: Basque, Catalan, Dutch, English, French, Frisian, Irish, Spanish and Welsh. Some of these languages, notably Welsh, have characters that do not exist in standard fonts: y and w with a circumflex accent in both small letter and capital forms.

Stylistic qualities

We thought it important that the typeface had the following visual attributes:

• long ascender nd descenders to help identify the shape of the words
• an informal ?feel
• a clear distinction between characters that might be easily confused
• avoidance of quirky or unusual characters shapes.

The Fabula typeface was designed by Vincent Connare, an MA student in the Department 1999-2000. He has designed a number of typefaces for Microsoft, including Comic Sans.

The font uses the alternative infant g, but not the corresponding infant a. This is because we were keen to make as much differentiation as possible between the sometimes confused a and o.

The font has long ascenders and descenders, and has the informal, friendly feel the Fabula team considers appropriate. It contains all the accented characters necessary for all the Fabula languages.