Source Sans Pro: Adobe’s first open source font family

Over on the Adobe Type Team Blog, Paul Hunt has penned an introduction to Source Sans Pro, a new type family he has designed specifically for use in Adobe’s open source applications. Much like Google’s Roboto, this family of fonts is intended primarily to be used in user interfaces, meaning it has to be legible at low resolution yet also readable enough to support long streams of text. Most notably, however, Source Sans Pro is Adobe’s first completely open source type family, meaning its free to use and tweak as you please, and there’s already support from various third-party font-serving websites like Typekit and Google Web Fonts. In fact, Google intends to make Adobe’s new typeface available in its Google Documents and Presentations web apps as part of an update to its font selection.