Some of our eagle-eyed readers may notice a change in the magazine this month. We have adopted a new body font for the magazine. In the past when we have refreshed our design, it was generally to keep pace with the aesthetics of the time. Some may remember that our color choice was quite bold after the magazine switched from a black and white print to full color. At the time, many in the industry celebrated color through using it wherever and however possible, an exuberant use of pigment that to the modern eye can read as garish. Things changed, and so did our design.

While we do think the new font is attractive, Art Director Monica Sterchi-Lowman selected it not just for its look but to address a challenge she’s been wrestling with for several years.

We have been covering Alaska Native corporations as an industry annually since September 1997, when we published the “1997 Native Corp. Review.” It featured interviews with executives of CIRI, The Aleut Corporation, Chugach Alaska Corporation, and ASRC, as well as a directory that included the Thirteenth Regional Corporation (which reported five employees, 5,500 shareholders, and FY95 gross revenue of $8.9 million).

As ANCSA and other Native-directed organizations have grown and transformed, so has our coverage of them. They have expanded far beyond the state and the early industries that they invested in. Increasingly over the years, there has been a movement among Alaska Natives to embrace their traditional languages and names, and we’re fortunate that they have shared their joy for their languages with their Alaskan neighbors. One well-known example was the North Slope community of Barrow choosing to go by the name Utqiaġvik. Note the diacritic overdot above the “g.” Some may wonder: how does one type this character? Fortunately, it’s a common enough special character that popular typing and editing programs list it as an option. However, Alaska’s traditional languages often use a variety of diacritics, many of which are not included as an option in all fonts and word processing programs. More than once, Sterchi-Lowman has spent crucial time right before our print deadline hand-drawing diacritics to make sure our representation of Alaska Native words is as accurate as it can be.

For this issue she took a new approach, and we have officially adopted Noto as our new body font. Noto is short for No Tofu; “tofu” refers to the blank boxes, often with Xs in them, that appear in text when a program or font family does not include a character that can accurately represent what should be written in that space. Noto includes fonts for “nearly all of the world’s writing systems,” according to its developers, “from Latin, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, and all Indic scripts, to Egyptian hieroglyphs and emoji.” Noto offers hundreds of styles, forming “a modular, flexible typographic system—for designers, writers, publishers, advertisers, software makers, students, and scholars everywhere.”

Sterchi-Lowman carefully reviewed our font options, presenting pages and pages of special characters to the editorial team and asking if any characters were missing that we know we need. All of the special characters that we use when we represent, to the best of our ability, the priceless traditional languages of Alaska seem to be present in Noto—and that is beautiful.