Remembering Vernon Adams

Open-source font developer Vernon Adams has passed away in California at the age of 49. In 2014, Adams was injured in an automobile collision, sustaining serious trauma from which he never fully recovered. Perhaps best known within the Linux community as the creator of KDE's user-interface font Oxygen, Adams created a total of 51 font families published through Google Fonts, all under open licenses. He was also active in a number of related free-software projects, including FontForge, Metapolator, and the Open Font Library. In 2012, he co-authored the user's guide for FontForge as part of Google's Summer of Code Documentation Camp, which we reported on at that time.

Speaking personally, Vernon was always quick to offer encouragement and assistance to newcomers—regardless of their experience with type design, FontForge, or free software in general. There were also few people who put as much energy into improving the usability of free-software design tools as he did. In addition, he was a constant advocate for free-software principles in the world of fonts—not just on development lists and at libre graphics conferences, but on type forums as well, where "open source" did not automatically garner a warm reception. The tagline on his web site was "fonts for everyone," and he meant it. He'll be missed.



