Adobe offers free font to celebrate 25 years of digital type design

To commemorate a quarter century of its Adobe Originals type program, a font free for all.

Lori Grunin Senior Editor / Advice

I've been reviewing hardware and software, devising testing methodology and handed out buying advice for what seems like forever; I'm currently absorbed by computers and gaming hardware, but previously spent many years concentrating on cameras. I've also volunteered with a cat rescue for over 15 years doing adoptions, designing marketing materials, managing volunteers and, of course, photographing cats.

Expertise Photography, PCs and laptops, gaming and gaming accessories

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Lori Grunin

May 15, 2014 8:03 a.m. PT

2 min read

I was thinking of writing a long discourse about how digital typography changed my life -- something I hadn't really thought about or realized until a couple of days ago when Adobe briefed me on its plan to celebrate 25 years of its Adobe Originals type design program with its 100th typeface, a new open-source font dubbed Adobe Source Serif. But life happened, and I'm going to have to leave that for another day.

Instead, I'll just toss out that you will be able to download Source Serif Pro for free. It also comes as part of Adobe Typekit, a part of Creative Cloud (including trial subscriptions), which finally rolled out font syncing at the end of April. Source Serif Pro is designed to complement the company's two other open-source fonts, variable and monospace sans serif typefaces. (On an interesting note, in August of 2012 a Typekit blogger commented "I don't think we currently have a need for an open-source serif, but that's not to say we won't ever.") Typophiles should note that Adobe will also be starting a blog series on its Typekit blog discussing (i.e., promoting) Adobe Originals. Update, 5/16/14: According to an Adobe representative today, "the actual release via Typekit and announcement of this news has been pushed back, given yesterday's CC outage. We don't have a confirmed release date at this time; the font is still live and available via SourceForge as well as via Typekit, but Adobe won't be announcing the news on the Typekit blog at this time."

Source Serif Pro includes three weights -- regular, semibold, and bold -- the most popular ligatures, and both standard and old-style numerals. Latin alphabet only, at least for now.

Adobe's open-source font program doesn't stem from a desire to provide freebies, but instead from a need to have fonts that meet the legal requirements to include with its growing number of open-source projects. Source Serif Pro perfectly represents Adobe's current strategy: it's an elegant, well-designed, and fairly complete font, but was created because it was essential to the business, and then tied to a company milestone by PR and marketing to drive Creative Cloud subscriptions. Download it with equal parts delight and cynicism.