@Ray Larabie has designed Canada 150, a single, unified typeface that supports Canada’s two
official languages, as well as the indigenous languages in use in Canada.
It’s a curious set-up, in which designers go through an application process to gain the use of the typeface and logo.
http://canada.pch.gc.ca/eng/1445028439342
Comments
After Canada's 150th birthday (2017) I intend to release it as open source. There might be some revisions before then. The Latin portion of Canada 150 is based on a free typeface I made last year that nobody noticed called Mesmerize.
Related articles of interest:
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/with-nine-written-versions-and-two-alphabets-inuit-language-finally-getting-much-needed-makeover
http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2015/08/28/major-change-proposed-for-inuit-writing/
http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674nunavik_school_board_launches_new_inuktitut_keyboard/
The hardest part was figuring out the British Columbia first nations languages. There are a lot of languages, many of which use bits and pieces of IPA, flipped letter ordinals and modified Greek letters. It's not that they're hard to draw, it's that they're hard to research. Not all of these languages has a Wikipedia page so it's hard to tell which glyphs are required. Do they use composites? Custom glyphs? Both? When a language is spoken by less than 100 people, it's hard to track down websites where that language is used.
Figuring out if a language is extinct or not is tricky. You can find out if a language is endangered but nobody announces a language becoming extinct. There were a few cases where I could find mention of a language being endangered over a decade ago and almost no recent Google results. Most of the ones I presumed were extinct shared characters with current languages so it didn't affect the outcome of the font anyway. There were two languages that I'm pretty certain were extinct but only required one or two extra glyphs anyway. The languages outside of BC were pretty easy to figure out... they're well documented.
I wish there was a chart for type designers showing us which accents need to be included. For the Canadian syllabics, there's a handy Unicode chunk to follow. But the rest of the required glyphs are scattered all across the Unicode map.
So cheap, no respect for the design profession.
First they crowd-sourced the logo as spec*, then they went looking for a free font to go with it!
Fortunately they found Ray, prepared to go the extra mile.
*That pissed off a lot of Canadian designers: https://www.gdc.net/article/2015/04/27/3166
And what is the appeal? I know there are people who get a kick out of riling other people, in and of itself. On the internet, they're called trolls. But given some relatively humanist things you've said in other threads, I am not inclined to just assume that's what's going on here.
There are times when $150K paid to an agency is the solution and times when a contest is the solution. For Canada 150, an event which encourages participation, a contest is a sensible solution. The Canada 150 project involves a lot of volunteer work. Should everyone involved have to be paid?
It's a birthday party logo: chill.
That's the attitude that makes for so much lousy public sector design: that design's just a bit of decoration, like putting up crepe paper at that birthday party. It's not a real thing. And when we agree to work for free for a client that clearly has a pot of money to spend, we help reinforce that.
You might find this site useful: http://www.languagegeek.com/alllangs/listoflangs.html. It has helped me figure out all the necessary glyphs for a number of languages. In the few images that I've spotted of your character set, it looks like you missed some.
If you're in Canada and it's still January 12th you can hear me on CBC in Hamilton, Edmonton, Calgary, Cape Breton, Victoria, Winnipeg, Kelowna, Charlottetown, Vancouver, Saskatchewan, Sudbury and Whitehorse.
Amerindian or Native Languages of Canada [PDF]
http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2681757074
I'm not 100% confident about the glyph set. I want to wait until it proliferates through first nations departments to get more feedback. I'm really having a good time with this; imagining people driving home from work and thinking about fonts and glottal stops. I did a video interview with Global news which should be on their site soon. I'm not sure if it'll be on TV. But it's not really about the design, more about the controversy.
Don't miss the Gizmodo article, the comments are a laff riot.