An independent archive of typography.
Topics
Formats
Typefaces

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website

Contributed by Eben Sorkin on Oct 15th, 2021. Artwork published in .
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website 1
Source: www.rferl.org License: All Rights Reserved.

From Wikipedia:

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a United States government-funded organization that broadcasts and reports news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus, and the Middle East where it says that “the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed”.

The organization shares its news from multiple websites, each serving a specific language or script. Most regional outlets use a local variation of the English-language website logo: an orange torch with the station name set in Futura.

The typeface used for body copy on the English-language Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website is Merriweather. Menu items and general navigation typography are set in Skolar Sans and on most websites it is paired with Skolar. The Cyrillic and Greek extension of Skolar and Skolar Sans was commissioned by the RFE/RL. One of the restraints for extending the language support of the Skolar type family, was the demand to keep the webfont sizes as small as possible, as type foundry Rosetta explains in their case presentation:

With RFE/RL’s mission to broadcast to millions of users in many countries with slow or censored internet, this is especially the case. But keeping site loading speeds high and file sizes small imposes a strict limit on fonts. Rosetta’s designers were faced with a double challenge: supporting a large number of languages in three different scripts, but keeping the size of the resulting fonts small despite their comprehensiveness. In the end, Rosetta’s solution was to drastically reduce font file sizes from around 268KB each to a set of 33–40KB subsetted webfonts – the result of a tight collaboration between designers and engineers, and repeated testing.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website 2
Source: www.rferl.org License: All Rights Reserved.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website 3
Source: www.rferl.org License: All Rights Reserved.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website 4
Source: www.svoboda.org License: All Rights Reserved.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website 5
Source: www.svoboda.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Typefaces

  • Merriweather
  • Skolar Sans
  • Skolar
  • Futura

Formats

Topics

Designers/Agencies

Artwork location

Post a comment