UX designers and front-end developers are typography’s new vanguard. This time it’ll be the web that leads the way in typography, not desktop apps. Adobe introduced Multiple Master technology in 1991, and since then, even though the technology died away for end users, font editors have offered interpolation between master designs.Ĩ. It’s interesting how the ideas brought to the fore by variable fonts have always been in typeface designers’ minds and in their daily practice. Apple had a specification ready, proved it worked on devices considerably less powerful than an Apple Watch, and is cooperating with Adobe, Microsoft and Google on the rebirth.ħ. Modern variable fonts are an almost exact revival of an early 1990s Apple technology, TrueType GX Variations. The technological history is fascinating.
Consequently the web, which once suppressed enthusiasm for these fonts, is now their biggest fan.Ħ. A single variable font isn’t much larger than a single regular font, yet contains within it the potential for many thousands of fonts. They compare very well against SVG, PNG, GIF and other icon formats: vector outlines, colour layers, hundreds saved in one small file, and there are often Unicode IDs to make them super-accessible.ĥ. For icons and emoji, variable fonts are probably the most efficient way to get them moving.
We can animate! Imagine that clicking the Bold button animates the transition between Regular and Bold, subtly informing the user of the many possibilities between them.
For emoji icons, we can imagine custom variation axes for the shapes of eyes, ears, mouths and hairstyles, or for custom adjustments of any symbol.Ĥ. The idea works just as well on non-alphabetic shapes: icons often have stroke width, which can be varied along a weight axis. We’re not limited to weight and width, but to anything about the letter-shapes that the typeface designer conceives as being smoothly adjustable: optical size, slant angle, x-height, serif length, descender height.ģ. Variable fonts let us, as font users, dial up the exact weight and width we want.Ģ. We’ve always been able to imagine a font somewhere between Regular and Bold, a font between Condensed and Extra Condensed. They open up what’s been implicit in type design ever since there were type families. What fascinates you about Variable Fonts?ġ. Since then I’ve been spreading the word about variable fonts in talks and workshops for font makers and web designers, and consulting for font makers. In October 2016 I launched Axis-Praxis, a website for designers to try out variable fonts in a simple typesetting interface, and for font makers to test and show off their own variable fonts. It was a somewhat frustrating that there was, initially, nowhere to play with variable fonts.
This time though, Apple, Adobe, Google and Microsoft are all working to a common goal: to support variable fonts in their operating systems, in their app suites, in web browsers. Unfortunately, back then, the web came along and everybody got distracted for a while. (For a typographer’s view on their potential, read Tim Brown’s blog post.) For me, it brought to mind the atmosphere of the early 1990s when several companies were competing with very similar ideas for the future of typography. The variable font announcement at the ATypI conference in September 2016 was really inspiring. I was a founder member of the team and helped to build the company into the leading retail font space. During my computer science degree I sketched out a system to create fonts using typographic parameters - that experience led to my first job in font engineering, and later consultancy for font companies. I’ve been a typography nut (as well as a cartography and cataloguing nut) since my teens, and I love writing programs and making databases that explore the digital potential of those obsessions. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your work The resulting conversation was first published in Yearbook of Type #3 ( Slanted Publishers, April 2018). Late in 2017 Clara Weinreich of Slanted Publishers posed 11 questions to Laurence Penney. Variable Fonts: a talk with Laurence Penney