Technology advancements, user expectations, and now industry standards are reshaping the competitive playing field in the mobile phone industry. Designers are looking for more freedom to create unique experiences on the device and consumers are expecting a much higher-fidelity mobile experience with scalable type that just looks and reads better.

Satoshi Asari and Paul Pugh

The rise in demand for the ultimate mobile experience means that designers of all types need to be able to integrate scalable fonts for devices and be able to use multiple typefaces much more efficiently than before.

The good news is that today’s mobile technologies increasingly embrace scalable typefaces, which can help you improve time-to-market, reduce memory requirements, leverage built-in flexibility and take advantage of typeface designs optimized for mobile environments and provider brands.

Virtually every mobile application can benefit from scalable fonts and font technology, such as:

• user interfaces
• e-mail
• mobile applications
• Web browsers
• SMS
• office applications
• ad content
• multimedia
• games and entertainment
• branded campaigns

By leveraging scalable fonts and font engines, you can overcome three main challenges of mobile phone user interface development:  scalability, style and multilingual capability.

Scalability
The scalability challenge is rooted in the fact that mobile phones initially used fixed-in-size bitmap fonts; many handsets still do. Yet, bitmap fonts have become inefficient in a number of ways, particularly their inability to support more than one text size.

Individual bitmaps are needed for each required size and variant of a design (such as italic). If the bitmaps on a certain mobile phone can’t support the designated font size or style of a given application, the user experience diminishes and the application loses impact.

Enter scalable fonts: Once the domain of desktop computers, scalable fonts store characters as data sets that define either outlines or strokes. The font engine scales the outlines or strokes and then fills them in to render the character to the specific size the application has requested.

Scalable fonts enable type to be rendered at any size – for different applications, different screen sizes, different resolutions and different products. This means you can bring to market applications that deliver an exceptionally high level of end-user convenience and ease of use. Scalable fonts, unlike inflexible bitmaps, also make applications more portable across handsets that have different screen displays.

Style
Now that scalable type is making its way into mobile application platforms, isn’t it possible to use any of the thousands of scalable desktop fonts for use in mobile applications? Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Most fonts haven’t been designed with mobile in mind. Various factors come into play to affect how well the design can perform on a mobile phone screen, while potentially degrading factors are at work. For example, low-resolution screens require fonts that have been optimized for low-resolution quality. Also, the limited screen real estate requires that each character in the font be height restricted. For the mobile environment, fonts need to be legible (ensuring clarity across the target range of devices), space economical (providing optimal on-screen character coverage), and impactful (delivering the desired effect, tone or emotion).

User interface fonts have an emphasis on legibility – designs that promote ease of use and at-a-glance reading at arm’s length. In addition to user interfaces, these fonts are practical for body copy and other textual content. Theme-based fonts are typefaces that fit the design concepts of games, applications, branding and other mobile projects. Theme-based fonts elicit emotion ranging from smart, to funny, to athletic.

Multilingual Capability
The market for data services is a global opportunity. However, without the proper font solution, which includes text layout capabilities to ensure the clear display and layout of multilingual characters that may require contextual character reshaping, mobile phones have difficulty supporting various language requirements.

For example, complex writing systems such as Arabic, Hebrew and Indic scripts present unique layout challenges. Unlike Latin-based languages where character form stays constant, characters from complex scripts may take on different shapes depending on adjacent characters. A resulting word may have an appearance unlike the characters used to build the word.

Today, text layout engines are satisfying unique multilingual requirements, enabling developers to provide applications and services to users in virtually every corner of the world – and consequently, tap new revenue streams.

Scalable and stylistic fonts, along with multilingual capabilities, present tremendous opportunities in the design and implementation in the ever-expanding world of mobile content. Through scalability, you’re able to bring to the mobile environment the same level of convenience and ease of use that had once been the domain of desktop computers.

Through stylistic fonts, you can maximize creativity and bring slick, distinct applications and services to market. Multilingual capabilities enable you to capitalize more comprehensively and quickly on the data services wave spanning the globe.

Ultimately, users can enjoy crisp, mobile text that is easy to read, highly emotive and in the language of their choice, thanks to the right font.

Asari is product marketing manager of Monotype Imaging and Pugh is creative director for frog design.