Game Console

Ascender Corp. Announces Xbox 360 Custom Branding Fonts

Elk Grove Village, IL (PRWEB) October 25, 2005

Ascender Corporation, a leading custom font development firm today announced that it designed the fonts for the new Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft. Ascender’s type designers and font software engineers created custom fonts tuned for high quality display on-screen in the Xbox user interface, as well as multilingual fonts to support the Xbox 360 branding and marketing.

“The Xbox 360 is an ambitious next-generation platform, and the fonts we created had to reflect the vision set forth by the Xbox 360 team,” said Steve Matteson, Ascender’s type director. “These fonts had to overcome demanding technical, multilingual and artistic challenges, because they will be used both on-screen and in traditional print and advertising applications” he added.

“The Ascender team really understood our design goals and created some exciting fonts” said Shelley Armstrong, Art Director for the Xbox Platform Experience. “They are a great partner to work with and we are thrilled with the results.”

Ascender worked closely with Microsoft to design fonts that expressed the Xbox 360 brand personality both on-screen and in print. The Xbox 360 introduces to game consoles an entirely new user interface, and the fonts needed to meet Microsoft’s design and technical requirements. The end result was a family of fonts named Convection™ designed by Steve Matteson that are exclusive to Microsoft.

The Convection font family includes regular, italic, bold and extra bold and a medium weight tuned specifically for the user interface. The main fonts include support for Western European and Greek, while a separate font was built to include Xbox icons and symbols for creating user manuals. Finally, Ascender also built Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts to complete the Xbox family.

Ascender Corp. specializes in creating multilingual, custom fonts for devices and branding. Steve Matteson was involved in designing the original Xbox fonts, as well as Microsoft’s corporate branding fonts. The Ascender team understands the issues involved with tuning fonts for on-screen legibility, as well as extending character sets to support Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and other scripts. Ascender works closely with branding agencies and clients to ensure that the font designs are consistent across character sets in all the brand’s markets, and are delivered in font formats such as TrueType, PostScript and OpenType for each client’s particular environments.

About Ascender Corporation

Ascender Corporation is a provider of advanced font products specializing in font design, development and licensing. Ascender’s founders are font industry experts, and have been involved in developing some of the most important and influential fonts used in computers, phones and printers. Ascender provides multilingual, custom font development for enterprises and hardware & software developers. Ascender also provides high quality fonts for immediate download from the Ascender Font Store website.

Contact:

Bill Davis

Ascender Corporation

25 Northwest Point Blvd, Suite 975

Elk Grove Village, IL 60007 USA

Phone: (847) 357 0730 ext. 10

Fax: (847) 357 0731

Trademarks: Ascender is a trademark of Ascender Corporation which may be registered in the US Patent and Trademark office and certain other jurisdictions. Microsoft, Windows, Convection, Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox Live are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

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