Google and Monotype kick off the Noto Project

Google has been trying hard to establish itself in every walk of the tech life. In its efforts, Google dabbled in the field of fonts. Now this is very odd but considering how fonts are the basic of our digital communication, Google’s move to dabble in it was not much of a surprise. Google partnered up with Monotype. Monotype is a font specializing company and the two started working on the Noto Project. It is a five year collaboration to create a typeface that applies to any language. It now offers a single font style which covers more than 800 language and 100 writing scripts. All of this is available under an open font license (OFL). It gives developers to modify the font design and make tweaks.

Noto project fails to inspire

The plan with this project encompasses a large area. No matter what language user use to consume their digital content in or write in, there should be no “unknown” characters. These unknown characters come off as white boxes. Google and Monotype embarked on a similar idea that these would look better if they were visually unified.

A Pakistani American writer Ali Eteraz wrote about this in 2014 and as per him, “I tend to go back and forth,” he said. “Is it sort of a benign — possibly even helpful — universalism that Google is bringing to the table? Or is it something like technological imperialism?”

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The Noto Project seems more functional than inspiring in the sense, that it does not give users many options to play around with. It is a global font language which will help in making communication better. The project is not something many people in the tech industry have thought to dabble in and Google’s efforts are quiet commendable. It has taken the company five years to develop this product that solves communication problems.

Image via TechToLead