This is a chronological list of 226 web resources for variable fonts. For historical context it starts in 1991 and includes material on the ancestors of variable fonts: Multiple Master fonts and Apple TrueType GX fonts.
2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | Variable Font Day | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2005 | 2004 | 1995 | 1994 | 1992 | 1991
12 June 2024
Laurence Penney — Google Fonts
Recording of Laurence’s in-depth demo of Fencer at Google’s New York office. The tool was used to add avar2 mappings for 4 use cases:
The demo starts at 21:25, then there’s a break from 1:15:00 to 1:33:20.
31 May 2024
Laurence Penney — Microsoft / ISO
The CFF2 format, which extends the PostScript-style CFF format to handle variable fonts (among other improvements), was introduced in 2016 in OpenType 1.8 but suffered from slow adoption compared with that of TrueType variable fonts. Laurence identified many shortcomings in the readability and accuracy of the CFF2 part of the OpenType/Open Font Format specification, and in 2021–2022 undertook a full rewrite. After review by specification experts from Adobe, Microsoft and others, it was published in May 2024.
23 May 2024
Affinity — Affinity
Affinity releases version 2.5 of its Designer, Photo and Publisher apps — for Windows, macOS and iPad — which handles variable fonts for the first time. The functionality appeared a little earlier in Version 2.5 Beta, released May 3, and seemingly earlier still in other builds.
To try out variable fonts in Affinity, apply one to some text and then:
You may see fewer axes in Affinity than are mentioned by a font provider’s marketing. For example, Google Fonts lists 13 axes for Roboto Flex and Affinity exposes five of them. This is because we respect font designers’ ability to specify that an axis should be hidden. This is part of the OpenType specification and means that software isn’t meant to provide an interface for such axes.
Affinity first announced support for variable fonts on April 12 in an interesting discussion forum thread. Ash states “You're now able to use variable fonts in all Affinity apps, providing a plethora of new typographic design possibilities.”
3 May 2024
Laurence Penney — Axis-Praxis
The Fencer web app has been released, being the first tool with which axis mappings can be interactively edited, and added to a variable font, helping to bring the power of “avar2” to a wider audience.
Fencer not only produces XML suitable for use in .designspace documents (for subsequent compilation with fontmake), but it also in realtime:
Fencer allows the current patched font and the current generated XML to be downloaded at any time.
The live tool is at https://lorp.github.io/fencer/src/fencer.html
10 January 2024
CSS Working Group — W3C
The CSS Working Group just discussed how the property font-stretch is unfortunately named, and agreed to the following:
RESOLVED: Add
font-widthproperty and descriptor and makefont-stretcha legacy alias.
Note: this resolves a longstanding issue with the use of the term “stretch” for a variation that is specifically not stretching.
31 May 2023
Behdad Eshahbod & Laurence Penney — GitHub
Based on a proposal from March 2023, the <mappings> and <mapping> elements have been added to .designspace documents. They are converted into a binary avar2 table by fontmake, using functionality in designspaceLib 5.1+.
12 May 2023
Dave Crossland — ATypI 2023 Paris
[43:09] Google Fonts continues to add or ‘onboard’ more and more variable fonts every year. To accelerate the onboarding process, we have commissioned improvements to our process, with better tools and documentation. As new variable fonts often introduce new axes to the Google Fonts product, a key step in onboarding is registering definitions of new axes within our systems. In this presentation, we will explain our axis registry, the tools and documentation we’ve developed around it that form a sort of protocol — and why you might want to create your own.
1 March 2023
Dan Rhatigan, Ariadne Remoundakis, Ben Welch
— Adobe Live
[59:20] Variable fonts are an exciting part of the type world, but how will they change our work and where is this all heading? Ari and Ben will dive into these questions with Dan Rhatigan, Director of Type Products at Type Network as our guest. Dan is a typographer with over 30 years of eclectic experience as a typesetter, graphic designer, typeface designer, and educator. His role at Type Network gives him both hands-on experience and a bird’s eye view of what’s going on in the world of fonts. In this episode you’ll learn:
23 February 2023
Jürg Lehni —
“Great news for variable fonts enthusiasts: The
Google Chrome team has finally addressed the memory leak that made the use of extensive variable animations on the web very difficult. There are no more crashes in Canary v113! 🎉
Many thanks to everybody involved in fixing this!”
23 January 2023
Adobe Fonts — Adobe
“It’s Variable Fonts Day on Adobe Fonts! FINALLY.” tweets Dan Rhatigan. Although variable fonts have been working in Adobe apps for some time, they are only now available for activation on Adobe Fonts. There’s an innovative UI for axis adjustment for font previews on the Adobe Fonts website, avoiding sliders. See Use variable fonts from Adobe Fonts for documentation.
22 October 2022
Laurence Penney & Dave Crossland — ATypI
[57:38] One of the early milestones within the Harfbuzz project’s Boring Expansion Spec is the specification of an “avar v2” table, which defines how axes can be composed from other axes. This takes Font Bureau’s Parametric Axes system and Underware’s HOI (Higher Order Interpolation for Variable Fonts) to the next level; Crossland and Penney demonstrate the file size reductions already proven and the typography improvements now made possible.
slides
10 June 2022
Bianca Berning — Pixel Pioneers
[32:30] Back in 2016, it was announced that OpenType Font Variations, better known as variable fonts, would be added to the OpenType specification. Since then many type designers have created hundreds of variable fonts. The designs have been both experimental and highly functional, testing not only the boundaries of the technology but also improving web performance. Bianca’s presentation will explore the functional and creative possibilities of variable font technology and illustrate how this area of type design has developed over the past six years. A little earlier, conference organizer Oliver Lindberg interviewed Bianca about the talk: Speaker Spotlight: Bianca Berning on Variable Fonts and the Future of Web Typography
20 May 2022
Bianca Berning — GRANSHAN
[15:17] Bianca introduces PixelFix, a new and proprietary font technology by Dalton Maag, developed to help improve the clarity of letters and symbols in modern applications on high resolution screens, and without the large file size increases often seen with traditional screen optimization techniques. The approach is particularly well suited to hinting variable fonts, saving much font engineering time compared with hinting by VTT.
20 May 2022
Octavio Pardo — GRANSHAN 2022
[18:54] Octavio notes that most legibility experiments are performed on a very small number of fonts, for the sake of practicality. He presents the first results of a new approach using a single parametric variable font (capable of generating millions of font instances) that is particularly suitable for optimizing settings for users suffering from various vision problems. Test subjects evaluate samples set in the font, starting with an arbitrary instance, then use a custom tool, Typographic MultiAxis Compass, to adjust parameters until they find an instance that most legible for their vision. There is no intention to find an overall “winner”, particularly since different problems of vision lead to different adjustments for optimal legibility. Each user’s selected instance is not intended to be used as a final font, but as parameters to guide the design of other fonts, or the settings of variation axes on other fonts, whether parametric or not. Interesting statistics from the test results are also presented.
10 May 2022
Figma — Figma
By far the best update announced at Config 2022 was that Figma now supports variable fonts: “Play more with the weight, width, and other specifications of your font to create responsive, accessible, and fun designs.”
5 May 2022
Sarah Daily — Google Fonts
As announced by this tweet:
Roboto Flex by @fontbureau is here! After 5 years of intensive development, its huge range of weights and widths across a complete stack of optical sizes is ready for you to use in all kinds of products and documents.
7 December 2021
Elliot Jay Stocks et al — Google Fonts
Wide-ranging encyclopedic resource on numerous aspects of digital typography, edited by Elliot Jay Stocks. Includes articles on what variable fonts are, as well as how to use them on the web and in desktop apps. Launch tweet: Say hello to Google Fonts Knowledge!.
3 December 2021
Peter Constable — ATypI All Over 2021
[55:45] It’s been five years since OpenType 1.8 and variable fonts were announced at ATypI 2016 in Warsaw. Peter Constable takes a look at where this innovation in type is at after five years: What’s worked well? What are ongoing challenges? Has it been a success? This session also considers some future innovations in variable fonts that might be worth exploring.
21 October 2021
MIchael Duggan — Google Fonts
Font Hinting has always been thought of as a ‘black art’ - some magic performed behind the scenes, hard to understand, and very difficult to do. This was true when hinting was done for low resolution screens and for older font rendering techniques, such as black and white or monochrome rendering. These older techniques required a lot of hinting code to ensure every feature in the font was strictly controlled and a consistent and clear on-screen display was maintained. This made hinting an extremely time-consuming and skilled task, for specialists only. In addition, hinting was often a manual process, involving writing and editing thousands of lines of TrueType code by hand.
The good news is that this is no longer the case. As screen resolutions and font rendering have improved, hinting has become a lot less complicated, with only a handful of hinting instructions needed for each glyph, to ensure consistent and beautiful rendering on-screen. In addition, VTT’s built in autohinter significantly speeds up the process, leaving the focus on editing and fine-tuning the hinting to achieve the best results.
Microsoft Visual TrueType is a software tool for viewing, editing, and adding hinting instructions to the outlines of TrueType and OpenType/TTF fonts. You use Visual TrueType after creating a font in a font editor or after converting an existing font to the TrueType format.
VTT has been upgraded to handle all aspects of hinting for variable fonts. The following tutorial will go into detail on all of the steps you will need to use VTT to automatically add, and then fine tune, the hinting for variable fonts. It accompanies the official docs in github.com/microsoft/VisualTrueType
Announced in this tweet.
14 July 2021
Monotype — Monotype
WOBURN, Mass.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Monotype today introduced Helvetica Now Variable, offering over a million new Helvetica Now styles in one state-of-the-art font file. Helvetica Now Variable builds on the 2019 release of Helvetica Now, which reimagined the clarity, simplicity and neutrality of classic Helvetica with 21st-century design needs including optical sizing, stylistic alternates and an extended character set. The variable font allows designers to blend Helvetica Now’s weights (hairline to extra black), optical sizes (four point to infinity) and new compressed and condensed widths to create infinite shades of expression, incredible typographic animations, and ultra-refined typography.
22 June 2021
Behdad Esfahbod — YouTube
[2:58:09] In a live video conference Behdad presents his proposals for improving the OpenType/Open Font Format. A fundamental change is to increase the maximum number of glyphs in a font from 2^16 (2 bytes, =65,536) to 2^24 (3 bytes, =16,777,216), a limitation that goes back to the early 1990s and that font makers are coming up against. Another proposal is to allow cubic Bézier curves in TrueType-style glyphs. Regarding variations, Behdad proposes:
avar table, satisfying the need for axis interdependence (one axis influencing others)4 May 2021
Michael Duggan — ATypI Tech Talks 2021
[1:49:47] Variable fonts have been adopted by all major browsers and are fast entering the mainstream as the newest exciting advance for fonts on the web.
This workshop, led by hinting expert Michael Duggan, will teach the basics of setting up and hinting variable fonts in the latest version of Microsoft Visual TrueType (VTT). Attendees will learn how to use the built-in autohinter in VTT to add hinting to variable fonts and easily fine-tune the results. With a focus on how hinting can be added to variable fonts simply and efficiently, this session will illustrate how attention to detail has a significant impact on making the most legible type for the screen.
This workshop will be instructional—no laptop is required. Note-taking is advised.
16 November 2020
Peter Constable — GitHub
“There’s been growing interest in non-linear, or higher-order, interpolation techniques in OpenType variable fonts (NLI). The basic idea is to get glyph contour points moving along curves as a variation axis changes, rather than in straight lines. A few people have prepared articles or presentations explaining NLI, though none so far has clearly explained why NLI works: what it is in the OpenType table formats that makes NLI possible. This aims to explain that.”
10 November 2020
Laurence Penney & Dave Crossland — Google Design
As variable fonts make their way into Google Fonts, learn what they are and their benefits for digital design–better compression for developers, greater expression for designers, and finer text typography for readers.
28 October 2020
D. Crossland, D. Berlow, S. Orozco — ATypI
[59:23] The Font Bureau was commissioned by Google Fonts in 2016 with the purpose of showcasing what the new variable font technology could do with two new fonts: Decovar Alpha and Amstelvar Alpha. While the former showed how more than a dozen axes of stylistic variations can be used (and abused) for display typography, the latter showed how a similar number of axes.
Amstelvar Alpha can be used to deliver unprecedented control and flexibility in text typography. In 2018, Google Fonts commissioned the Font Bureau to apply the parametric axes approach to Roboto, transforming it from a UI typeface to an extreme typography system that pairs with Amstelvar. At ATypI 2020, the presenters will introduce the first official releases of Amstelvar and Roboto Flex in roman and italic styles for Latin, and share a glimpse into the future with Greek and Cyrillic.
Following their detailed discussion, Crossland and Berlow will offer a dedicated Q&A to further explore a presentation packed with both novel and advanced text typography techniques.
1 August 2020
Stephen Nixon — CSS-Tricks
Stephen’s explainer about how to use more complex variable fonts hosted on Google Fonts, using his own font Recursive as an example.
29 May 2020
Tom Rickner — The One Club for Creativity
[41.15] While most designers have heard of variable fonts, many still view them as an emerging technology seemingly reserved for experimentation and type nerds. In actuality, variable fonts empower designers with complete control over their design, enabling a range of opportunities for forward-thinking brands and solving numerous problems designers have long-faced in using typography on the web. Join Tom Rickner, Creative Type Director at Monotype, for a “what’s what” on the now and tomorrow of variable fonts, featuring a live demonstration of what variables can achieve where static fonts cannot.
12 March 2020
Corel — Corel
[04:22] One of the new typography features in CorelDRAW 2020 is support for variable fonts. Variable fonts allow you to modify font properties such as width, slant, weight and more, resulting in a wide variety of looks from just one font. In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to access these features and experiment with different properties to fine-tune the look of text in your designs.
9 March 2020
Mandy Michael — UX Collective
Variable fonts reduce the overall combined file size and automatically reduce the number of network requests by simply being a variable font.Even if you consider the slightly larger file sizes, when combined with improved font compression formats like WOFF2, font subsetting and font loading techniques, we can still get smaller overall font file sizes as well as a significant increase in stylistic opportunity.
10 February 2020
Bianca Berning — It’s Nice That
The type foundry’s creative director Bianca Berning explains where type’s most exciting innovation came from, how it’s made, who its key players are, and where the medium might go next.
21 December 2019
Giulia Laco — WordCamp Milano
17 December 2019
Jason Pamental & Drew McLellan — Smashing Magazine
[47:27] In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about variable fonts. What are they, how do they differ from regular fonts, and how can they help in the design and performance of our websites?
30 November 2019
FontLab — FontLab
How to work with font variations in FontLab 7.
30 November 2019
FontLab — FontLab
A general introduction to the concept of variable fonts, axes, masters and instances.
20 November 2019
Laurence Penney — Google / GitHub
Samsa, the variable fonts visualizer by Laurence Penney of Axis-Praxis, becomes open source today on GitHub. Many thanks to Google Fonts for the generous funding that made development possible. [GitHub] [web app]
15 November 2019
Bekah McDonald — Fontsmith
Short article on variable fonts with some CSS examples, published to coincide with the launch of Fontsmith’s Variable Fonts minisite which was created by the author and her team at Taylor/Thomas.
25 October 2019
Roel Nieskens — Pixel Ambacht
An issue in using variable fonts in CSS is that axis settings are not normally inheritable separately. That is, if you set axis #1 to 35 and axis #2 to 79 for a CSS element, there is no way to control just axis #2 in a child of the element. You must repeat the definition of axis #1 as well. This goes against the widely celebrated inheritance principles of CSS. Roel Nieskens describes a neat solution to inheritance that uses CSS variables.
20 September 2019
Rob Stenson & James Edmondson — Ohno Type
[1:38] Perhaps the greatest typeface release video ever made: Rob Stenson’s animation of Obviously by James Edmondson (Ohno Type) imagines a town where almost everything is made of variable fonts.
1 September 2019
Arthur Reinders Folmer — Typearture
Variable color fonts, how do they work? What can you do with them? Are they going to change the web? Well I don’t know all answers, but I’ll give you an initiation. I hope this tiny guide, combined with links to pieces written by people much smarter than me, will clear up some things!
1 September 2019
Irene Vlachou & Laurence Penney
— ATypI 2019
A common issue with multiscript typography arises when a graphic identity, originally designed with only Latin in mind, is later extended to cover other scripts—more often than not, the fonts lack the necessary characters. The problem becomes particularly acute on the web, where texts in scripts unforeseen by a site’s designers may need to be published. The two obvious solutions—either to switch to a typeface with a larger character set or to commission an expanded character set for the existing typeface—may not always be practical. With this in mind, and taking inspiration from David Berlow’s parametric fonts, this session presents an experimental system using a set of specially designed Greek variable fonts. Measurements are taken from a given Latin font and applied to the variable font, a synthetic Greek font being produced that matches the measurements—stem widths, cap height, x-height, and so on—of the Latin font. While not achieving the quality of custom Greek typefaces, the parametric fallback fonts are significantly more pleasing to the eye than the typical alternative of system fonts.
29 August 2019
Nathan Williams — CodePen
Code examples for Google Fonts’ new “css2” API for retrieving the CSS that loads the latest variable fonts published at Google Fonts.
14 June 2019
Mandy Michael — Mandy Michael
This project was created by Mandy Michael to showcase the many possibilities and opportunities that variable fonts can offer developers and designers on the web. The aim is to provide developers with the resources and tools needed to use variable fonts in their own projects.
31 May 2019
Jason Pamental — CSSconf EU 2019
[31:46] Variable fonts are a transformative evolution of type design that has huge performance and design implications for the web. When coupled with CSS custom properties and calculations, they make for a completely new way to think about typography and UX. This talk will show how these technologies and techniques can be combined in a unique way to enable dynamic, fluidly scaling typography that reacts to screen size and other aspects of user context. It’s a perfect complement for better design systems and accessibility, too.
16 May 2019
David Berlow — TDC/Google
[1:52:01] The last 30 years have seen a great growth in the possibilities of how typefaces can function. TDC medalist David Berlow illustrates his quest for the perfect, scalable, variable letterform, and the challenges faced servicing the ever-expanding, multi-lingual media world. Berlow discusses the design of glyphs over a range of sizes and weights, and how the designs can be specified to work together in web and print environments. He also demonstrates and describes inter-script, inter-class and inter-style typography, and concludes with a question-and-answer session.
22 April 2019
Franz Ressel — !important focus
[10:36] Today’s episode of !important focus is the second part of a two part series exploring the details of variable fonts. In this episode, we explore how to work with variable fonts in CSS.
18 April 2019
Franz Ressel — !important focus
[10:44] Today’s episode of !important focus is the first part of a two part series exploring the details of variable fonts.
4 April 2019
Moses Kim — Shakuro
We listed variable fonts among the 2019 UX design trends. Time to extrapolate. The reason why variable fonts are not yet as common as they should be is that there is no universal way of integrating them into the UI. Designers have already requested the variable font functionality to be implemented in Figma which we believe will eventually happen. With that said, it’s important to understand why variable fonts matter and what they can bring to design on different occasions. We’ll go through the reasons they exist, tap into how they work, go over some cool examples, and see how we can integrate variable fonts into real interfaces.
14 March 2019
Amy Papaelias — Adobe Create
Isabel Lea (whose LOUD variable font experiment got 1.6K likes on Twitter) didn’t expect to fall down the rabbit hole of variable font technology. But since the London-based graphic designer started the Adobe Creative Residency in May 2018, she's repeatedly found herself at the intersection between technological experimentation and typographic innovation.
3 March 2019
Matthew Ström — Matthew Ström
Ever since I first learned about variable fonts, I’ve wanted to use them in my own work. After learning that Source Serif and Inter both had variable versions, I started switching this site over to use them. Here’s how I implemented the change, and what I learned along the way.
15 February 2019
Rob Stenson — AdakTypo
In-depth tutorial on creating typographic animations using DrawBot, variable fonts and After Effects.
1 February 2019
Ken Lunde — Adobe
This is a short article that is simply meant to draw developers’ attention to three OpenType/CFF2 Collections (aka Variable Font Collections) that I built this week, which are now available in the open source Variable Font Collection Test project. As stated in the project, the purpose of these Variable Font Collections is to simulate the Source Han and Noto CJK fonts deployed as Variable Fonts, to help make sure that the infrastructure—OSes, apps, layout engines, libraries, and so on—will support them.
30 January 2019
Bianca Berning — Shopify Partners
Until the digital age, typography had evolved alongside our means of communication, with typographers primarily concerned with creating as good a reading experience as possible. But printed text is inflexible… with few exceptions, web typography is less accommodating than print typography … To improve the online reading experience, OpenType Font Variations, better known as variable fonts, have been introduced … improved web performance and greater typographic flexibility … As variable fonts are now supported by all major browsers, there is the potential to start using this technology already to improve general standards.
1 January 2019
Tyler Finck — Etcerera Type Company
We've had more than a few people ask us how to animate variable font properties. Software like After Effects does not yet support variable fonts (installed vfonts don't even show up in the app) which is a bummer. The same can be said for Premiere, Final Cut Pro, all the places you'd like to be able to make the text move! Drawbot is one option, if you know or are willing to learn Python. But we have a simple method to animate in a familiar setting: basic HTML/CSS! The only caveat is to not play the animation on an infinite loop. Why? Keep reading.
7 December 2018
Johannes Lang — GitHub
Scripting and interpolation make it very easy to extend the designspace but exponential growth might make it very hard to keep all corners of the designspace under control. Visualizing it might help to decide which areas are relevant and which combinations of axis values might be useless. Different designs and axes need different solutions and there are several ways on how to traverse a line, area, cube or multidimensional space. So the following scripts should not be considered as answers but be regard as sketches.
28 November 2018
Tyler Finck — Etcetera Type Company
[18:37] A quick disclaimer: I am not a Glyphs expert or even variable font expert. There are probably a few ways to make a good multiple master/variable font. This information is all free and public on the Glyphs site https://glyphsapp.com/tutorials/creat... (where I found it).
17 November 2018
Akiem Helmling, Bas Jacobs (Underware) — Dynamic Font Day, Munich
[53:43] Dynamic Fonts (like OT 1.8) relate to tradtional fonts, like the web does to printed matter. Just like with the internet, it’s not the technologies themselves which matters but above all the consequences they imply. Meanwhile we all noticed that HTML, CSS & Javascript are not the web itself, but just technologies helping us to realise the bigger underlying idea: the dynamification of information. The same applies for OpenType 1.8. Just like HTLM, also the latest version of OT is not a new idea as such, but a new technological standard embedded withint an idea: the dynamication of the written word. A highly delicate situation where language itself is becoming variable. Where 18 is 96.
17 November 2018
Andrew Johnson — Dynamic Font Day, Munich
[26:38] As a key component of any graphical interface, typography often finds itself in new spaces. The current landscape of Augmented Reality and sensor enabled displays give us unique ways to think about how we interact with type and information. Here, we can apply variable font concepts to make typography more adaptive to us.
17 November 2018
Irene Vlachou — Dynamic Font Day, Munich
[27:22] Variable fonts are a delayed and versatile technology that confuses users and fontmakers. Typographers have to unlearn what they’ve learned and change the way that they design, use and teach type. A rough guide for a variable-savvy era and how you can survive, thrive or simply avoid it.
17 November 2018
Rasmus Michaëlis, Torsten Lindsø — Dynamic Font Day, Munich
[18:31] What are the possibilities of a variable typeface? Recently, Rasmus Michaëlis and Torsten Lindsø have explored how a typeface could respond to sound for Chinese audio tech company Goertek. Through variable font technology, the design team made the letters sound sensitive to their surroundings. Placed on signage throughout Goertek’s R&D hub in China, the design will assist in way-finding and express the brand. Typefaces’ branding potential will only grow as it is combined with the evolving potential of the digital world and the variable font format creates new possibilities for bringing in elements into the design from outside the world of letters. Rasmus and Torsten will discuss the opportunities of a variable typeface in the perspective of branding supported by projects and sketches.
8 November 2018
Mandy Michael — dotCSS
[19:17] The web is entering a new era of design opportunities with the introduction of CSS Grid, Photoshop like effects such as filters and blend modes and importantly the increasing support for Variable Fonts. Variable fonts can offer practical and creative opportunities for web design. We can combine them with pre-existing technologies to improve our font performance, design, accessibility and usability of our websites. We can also begin to explore new and exciting creative opportunities for story telling, design and expression in ways standard fonts could never provide us. This is just the beginning of our journey to discover what we can do with variable fonts. [slides]
6 November 2018
Oliver Schöndorfer — Beyond Tellerand Berlin 2018
[33:13] Variable fonts will shape the future of web typography. They can bring great variety and new opportunities at a low file size. But with many possibilities you can also choose wrong. This practical talk guides you through the first steps with variable web typography, accompanied by several use cases and examples. What are variable fonts, what can you do with them, when do they make sense, and what should you be aware of? Be good to type and be ready for the next technology shift in your browser.
29 October 2018
Oliver Schöndorfer — Zeichenschatz.net
With variable fonts, more typographic richness and influence is coming to the web and this at a relatively low file size. You want to benefit from that in your next web project, but still, you don’t want to bet everything on this new technique? This article will show you how to integrate a variable font in your website and use classic web fonts as a fallback.
23 October 2018
various authors — Mozilla MDN
Firefox 63 adds support for editing the properties of variable fonts in the Font Editor. If the inspected element uses a variable font, the Fonts tab shows the axes that have been implemented for that particular font, providing control to alter the value of each one. This is very useful for quickly finding out what axes are available in a particular font — they can vary quite dramatically as font designers can implement basically anything they like. You can adjust the axes individually or, if the font designer has included defined instances, you can select one from the "Instance" drop-down list and view the updates live on your page.
10 October 2018
Jason Pamental — An Event Apart
This talk is the latest in Jason’s series about the new web typography that variable fonts make possible. The slideshow was created entirely in HTML and CSS, so is itself an excellent demonstration of the techniques and technology that Jason talks about.
8 October 2018
Wenting Zhang and Thomas Jockin — Medium/Type Thursday
Variable fonts can be difficult to understand but Font Playground is here to help. Font Playground creates a dialogue between font makers and users by an intuitive UI. Find out Wenting Zhang’s insights and process about variable fonts and UI in this interview by Thomas Jockin.
7 October 2018
David Berlow — BITS 8
[37:40] David Berlow
21 September 2018
Bram Stein — CSS Minsk JS
You may have heard about variable fonts and how amazing they are (or not, in which case you should attend this talk!). But what exactly are variable fonts, and why are so many people excited about them? Is it because they offer exciting new ways to animate type? Or to endlessly tweak your typography? Or are they the answer to all your web font performance problems? Let’s find out!
15 September 2018
Petra Rüth — ATypI Antwerp
[16:44] In the late 18th century, C. G. Roßberg, a German clerk, worked on a stunning project: he envisioned a system of scripts which would harmonize together. Following the Renaissance approach, where science and art were intermingled, his aim was to encapsulate the beauty of letters in a mathematical system.
15 September 2018
David Berlow — ATypI Antwerp
[42:14] The last 25 years have created what I think of as the fog of modern typography. Now the combination of existing technologies, and new Technologies are spreading a whole new level of quality, functionality and performance over the foggy old system. While not directly breaking from the old, the new technologies allow us to clear the fog, get back to our roots and/or move forward to a whole new tradition. This leaves a lot of questions about the past, present and future, right and wrong, good and bad. This will be a presentation of what one type designer is doing about it.
14 September 2018
Sami Kortemäki, Akiem Helmling (Underware) — ATypI Antwerp
[37:19] HOI is the abbreviation of Higher Order Interpolation. By introducing this new perspective for font interpolation we can do things not achievable with traditional linear interpolation. HOI is a simple and “ready-to-use” solution to fully control our manually designed masters and interpolation. HOI is not only expanding the field in which fonts are designed and exist, but also questions some foundations of type design: like the concepts of design-space, masters, locations, and interpolations.
14 September 2018
Adam Twardoch — ATypI Antwerp
[22:31] The history of outline font editors spans some 40+ years, or the total of this speaker’s life. Ikarus, Pika, Fontographer, RoboFog, Type Art, FontStudio, TypeDesigner, FontLab, RoboFab, FontMaster, RoboFont, Glyphs, FontCreator – since the inception of outline-based font creation, type designers have employed a flurry of computer applications that have aided them in the development of type. … The tool makers came, went, or continued to reinvent. … In this talk, we will revisit some old and new type creation apps running on operating systems extinct and alive, including some of your [variable] favorites.
12 September 2018
Jeremy Mickel, Leon Imas — ATypI Antwerp
[22:22] Variable Fonts show great promise for the future of typography, but have had few commercial applications. This is likely due to limited support in design programs, confusion about how the format can be used, and typical lag between the introduction of new technology and widespread adoption. Adidas has partnered with MCKL to create an innovative suite of variable fonts. These fonts are being used across a wide spectrum of applications, including Creative Direction, Product Design, Graphics, Communications, Digital Experiences, and the brand campaign for the upcoming World Cup. MCKL founder Jeremy Mickel will tell the story of his long collaboration with Adidas, which started in 2012 and includes the 2015 expansion of the Adineue PRO family. In 2017 they started the first Adidas Variable Font, Adineue CHOP variable: an octagonal “athletic” sans in a wide range of weights from hairline to black, and widths from extra-condensed to extra-wide. The next iteration of the project includes Adineue PRO variable, based on the geometric Adidas brand font. This talk will include discussion of the design process behind collaborating with Adidas, the production headaches and surprises associated with new technology, and the final payoff of seeing the fonts used in exciting ways.
12 September 2018
Jeff Wu, Edwina Lee — ATypI Antwerp
[17:09] There are about 28,000 Chinese characters that need to be designed. The average number of strokes in a Chinese character is 12. In Arphic JingXi Hei, for example, the average number of control points for each stroke is about 100. Therefore, there are about 33,600,000 control points to deal with when developing a Chinese typeface. When creating a Variable Font, the control points of every pole of every axis need to correspond, so it’s a huge work to design, test the transfer to a Variable Font, and fix the design and control points. In this talk Jeff Wu shares the problems he met in developing Chinese Variable Fonts and how he overcame them.
12 September 2018
Bianca Berning — ATypI Antwerp
[18:21] Bianca Berning opens the day with an update on the adoption of Variable Fonts, the development of solutions for VF rendering, and progress on workflows for VF testing and development.
12 September 2018
Henrique Beier — Harbor Type
Support for color fonts has seen a considerable increase in the last couple of years. On top of that, variable fonts technology has opened up another plethora of possibilities. Merit Badge, by David Jonathan Ross, was the typeface that inspired me to go into this rabbit hole and release Rocher Color. This is its story.
11 September 2018
Mark Frömberg — CodePen
I started a new CopePen Project: Variable Font Experiments. It is a playground to discover what’s possible when vFonts and CSS clash together. I’m in charge of pulling all strings on all sides.
5 September 2018
Mozilla — Mozilla
NEW: CSS Variable Fonts (OpenType Font Variations) support, which makes it possible to create beautiful typography with a single font file.
4 September 2018
Dan Callahan — Mozilla Hacks
Firefox 62, which lands in general release this week, adds support for Variable Fonts, an exciting new technology that makes it possible to create beautiful typography with a single font file. Variable fonts are now supported in all major browsers. What are Variable Fonts?
31 August 2018
Jason Pamental — MDN
Variable fonts are an evolution of the OpenType font specification that enables many different variations of a typeface to be incorporated into a single file, rather than having a separate font file for every width, weight, or style. They let you access all the variations contained in a given font file via CSS and a single @font-face reference. This article will give you all you need to know to get you started using variable fonts.
30 August 2018
Oliver Schöndorfer — Frontend Conference Zurich
[37:55] Variable fonts will shape the future of web typography as they can bring great variety and new opportunities at a low file size to our browsers. This practical talk guides you through the first steps with variable web typography, illustrated by several use cases and examples. What are variable fonts, what can you do with them, when do they make sense, and what should you be aware of? It’s time to be more variable and get this new technology in the browser!
14 August 2018
Claudio Ribeiro — SitePoint
Despite being available for several years now, variable fonts are still in their infancy. Browser support is scarce and there are few fonts to choose from. However, the potential is enormous, and variable fonts will permit better performance while simplifying development.
9 August 2018
Mathieu Triay — Prototypr/Medium
Variable fonts are supported in Photoshop, Illustrator, Safari, Chrome, Edge and soon enough Firefox (and hopefully InDesign). At BBC R&D we thought this wide support was a signal that the technology is maturing … thinking about how we can make use of this technology to improve the experience we provide for our users … we invited the type designer David Jonathan Ross to lead an exploratory workshop…
5 August 2018
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer — TypeCon
[21:42] Variable Fonts are the latest craze. But can you have fun with them too? You bet. Let Rainer take you on a quick tour through the fun side of OpenType Variations. Like in his infamous Denver presentation about OpenType features, there will be no prepared slides, all typing will be done live.
4 August 2018
Akiem Helmling, Sami Kortemäki (Underware) — TypeCon
[20:50] The major challenge of type design in the 20th century was how straight lines could become curves. With fonts becoming variable, the same problem just arose again. Only this time it’s not about the outlines, but about the interpolations, creating those outlines.
While most type designers are working with interpolation based design-spaces to design large families or even Variable Fonts, there still seems to be a limited conception of the possible meaning of this ‘design model’. There is for example the strange contradiction that while type designers know exactly that stretching form is a bad idea, they are accepting that linear interpolating manually designed masters is exactly doing that for all the weights in-between. No matter if this interpolation is used for generating static fonts, or within a Variable Font. And while un-wanted results could be fixed manually afterwards for static fonts, there is no afterwards in the realm of Variable Font.
Despite the potential risk of getting intimidated by advanced technology, the real problem may not lie so much in the technology itself, but in the way we use it to define and create our ideas. Instead of thinking through technology, we could also reverse this process and make the technology think for us.
So what is a design space actually really about? And what if there is no space at all?
20 July 2018
Chris Coyier — CSS-Tricks
I tend to think of variable fonts as a font format in which a single font file is capable of displaying type at near-infinite variations of things like boldness, width, and slantyness.
But things like boldness, width, and slantyness and just a few of the attributes that a type designer might want to make controllable. There are no rules that say you have to make boldness a controllable attribute. Literally, anything is possible, and people have been experimenting with that quite a bit.
18 July 2018
Richard Rutter, Oliver Lindberg — Creative Bloq
Typography on the web has come a long way. About a decade ago it was still woefully underused and done very poorly – damaging user experience. … People were throwing their hands in the air, claiming you couldn’t do typography on the web well. … But there’s one man that has been trying to convince people otherwise and that's Richard Rutter … One of the biggest game changers right now is the advent of variable fonts, a technology that enables a single font file to behave like multiple fonts.
16 July 2018
Wentin Zhang — @designjokes
Font Playground is for playing with variable fonts. It’s built for three groups of audiences: 1, typographers and designers, who would like to play with fonts that are built with the latest font technologies; 2, me (Wentin Zhang), as a Type Tool UI/UX designer to test UI experiments for variable fonts and other new upcoming font technologies; 3, type designers and foundries to showcase work in progress, cutting-edge font creations.
11 July 2018
David Berlow — TypeParis
[1:45:44] David Berlow’s wide-ranging talk at TypeParis 2018, where he discusses in detail his parametric approach to variable fonts.
5 July 2018
Johannes Neumeier — Underscore
Variable Fonts are an exciting step into a direction that is inherently embedded in modern type design technology. With user adaptation it will become more clear what are the use cases and market for this new format, but for now, most of the conventional font retailers are scrambling for viable licensing and pricing models that are bound to increase, not inhibit, the spread of Variable Font usage. So far type designers and foundries have been more concerned with the how and when of Variables Fonts, but one of the largest implications of this format is neither technical nor creative: Giving users control over the entire family span of a typeface prompts redefining what a font is, and what is the value it brings to customers.
29 June 2018
Irene Vlachou — Ampersand Conference
[22:53]
29 June 2018
David Jonathan Ross — Ampersand Conference
[40:45]
29 June 2018
Bianca Berning — Ampersand Conference
[39:48]
20 June 2018
Kezz Bracey — envato-tuts+
[1:36:00] A video tutorial in 15 short lessons about using and deploying variable fonts.
18 June 2018
Irene Vlachou — GitHub
A step-by-step guide for building a variable font using Feature Variations. It includes tips and insight about common problems. It builds upon Travis Kochel's guide for variable fonts and Miguel Sousa's documentation on Adobe variable font prototype. For this guide the source files should be in UFO format and fonttools, fontmake and TTX need to be installed. Scary Terminal and a good text editor are necessary.
29 May 2018
Laurence Penney, Oliver Lindberg — Pixel Pioneers
Variable fonts are one of the biggest game changers for web typography. We caught up with font technology consultant Laurence Penney, who will present a talk on this subject at Pixel Pioneers Bristol on 8 June, to discuss why variable fonts are such a big deal, how you can use them today and more.
28 May 2018
Oliver Schöndorfer — Zeichenschatz.net
Variable fonts are the font technology made for the digital era. They have the power to bring more typographic richness to the web at a lower file size. But with new possibilities and advantages new challenges and complexity arise. So what’s so hot about the next big thing since the introduction of web fonts (at least to all type nerds) and how can you use it?
24 May 2018
Mandy Michael — Adobe Create
For the first time on the web, we can animate the text itself without needing SVG or web technologies such as JavaScript or Canvas … Typography plays an important role in our process, and for a long time its uses on the web have been constrained. Variable fonts, combined with a host of new techniques in CSS, are giving us opportunities to do amazing things. I hope you push the boundaries and experiment with new designs.
19 May 2018
Underware — Underware
Underware's playground for Variable Fonts, introduced at their TYPO Berlin talk, The Tale of the Cat. Play with live demos that they have been showing in their recent presentations: Safari Braille, Duos In-N-Out (make the visible invisible and the other way around), Duos Write (a dynamic Variable Font which is writing itself), Safari From A-to-B (Letter Wheel), Safari From-A-to-B (turn water into wine), Zeitung
(the classic Zeitung Torch demo), Zeitung Variable, Zeitung Variable/Flex (an extension for InDesign & Illustrator).
19 May 2018
Marianna Paszkowska — TYPO Berlin
[34:15] In her talk, Marianna will show what makes axis-based fonts development so exciting. She will help you understand how they work and show the potential of Variable Fonts from useful workhorses to the those experimental and fun. Finally, she will discuss what possibilities and challenges dynamic fonts together with today’s fast developing technology can bring to the designers, and what it could mean to the end user.
17 May 2018
Jason Pamental — Medium
While variable font technology is still maturing and type designers are working to become more fluent in this new way of working, the promise for design on the web is ground-breaking. The typical scenario would be to constrain any given design to 3–5 different fonts to represent every aspect of a site’s design language and voice — including every permutation for body copy and headings. At its simplest implementation, variable fonts would give us the freedom to use different weights for every level of heading — greatly increasing their clarity and readability … the entire typographic system could be designed to be proportional: weight and width could become multipliers on the standard body copy settings. Doing so would allow those aspects to scale easily along with the body copy should its settings change based on screen size or user preference. All of this with an accompanying increase in performance due to fewer HTTP requests and an overall savings of data.
17 May 2018
Jason Pamental — CodePen
A working example that implements several of the latest responsive CSS, including variable fonts. The text (Jason’s Medium article listed separately) is set in the new FF Meta Variable font. Shrink and expand the page width to feel the power of this approach.
15 May 2018
María Ramos — Alphabettes
“Visualizing the design space of a variable font in our 2D screens can be tricky. Our imagination can take us far, but decoding a figure with more than 3 dimensions is still a difficult task for our brain.” María presents a spider diagram approach that in principle handles an unlimited number of dimensions. It’s similar to Petr van Blokland’s proposal of behaviour needles, but with the default at the centre (hence the possibility of self-intersecting shapes).
27 April 2018
Laurence Penney, Clara Weinreich — Slanted/Medium
Late in 2017 Clara Weinreich of Slanted Publishers posed 11 questions on variable fonts to Laurence Penney. The resulting conversation was first published in Yearbook of Type #3 (Slanted Publishers, April 2018).
26 April 2018
Richard Rutter — Medium
18 April 2018
Rebecca Franks — Over Engineering
Variable Fonts are currently … available for Android O (version 26) and above. There is no word on if it’ll be in the Android Support Library, which means we can’t use it yet (or we need to hide it behind an Android version check). Let’s hope it comes into the Support Library. … Regardless of the gotchas, this is an interesting change that we will hopefully be able to take advantage of soon. Not only in Android development but in Web development as well. This opens up plenty more options for Fonts on Android …
14 April 2018
Luc(as) de Groot — TYPO Labs
[50:24] Luc(as) discusses problems in interpolation and presents an n-dimensional cube UI to manipulate multiple axes at once.
14 April 2018
Akiem Helmling, Bas Jacobs (Underware) — TYPO Labs
[55:56] In type technology, wonders never cease. But then why do we accept digital type to be as primitive as it is? Why don’t we just make a lettering ourselves, instead of pressing keys? Why does a good interface for new technologies still lack? Why does type have so many limitations, when “everything is possible”? Questions, questions. [Among many other delights, Underware presents for the first time the remarkable Higher Order Interpolation method.]
14 April 2018
Underware — Underware
HOI could already be very welcome for creating animated fonts in a much more advanced way … “bending” outlines around a curve instead of crudely just shifting the points of the outlines. This would not only reduce the amount of required masters on a time axis, but also lead to much more fluent transitions. Those crude stop-motion animations can now play smoothly in slow-motion for example. HOI could also change or influence the type design process. Until today type designers have always been drawing outlines of static fonts while designing type families. But while designing variable fonts the designer isn’t drawing outlines any longer. Instead, the interpolation curves are actually being designed, the outlines of a static font are just a result from this. This requires a different mindset and approach to the type design process … type designers can start designing correlations between letters, instead of designing the outlines of letters
14 April 2018
Verena Gerlach, Maciej Połczyński — TYPO Labs
[20:32] This presentation shows and explains the approach and the results of a one week VF workshop, that took place at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw. Getting inspired by the architecture of the city of Warsaw, the students learned via animation to understand the mysteries of interpolation.
14 April 2018
Peter Constable — TYPO Labs
[34:02] Peter speaks about support for variable fonts in the Microsoft ecosystem and elsewhere, non-standard axis values, FeatureVariations, and Microsoft’s nascent Font Store.
14 April 2018
Adam Twardoch — TYPO Labs
[49:24] FontLab VI was created with variable fonts in mind. Liberated from the limits of the Multiple Master approach, FontLab VI offers support for an arbitrary number of masters that can be placed anywhere on any axis within the design space. In this talk, Adam will discuss how to start a variable font project in FontLab VI, transfer variable font data from other formats into FontLab VI, define axes, font masters and glyph masters, how to explore the design space and manage different master designs, how to draw and edit contours across different masters, automatically or manually create interpolation-ready drawings, and how to prepare variable font sources for production as OpenType Variation fonts and as static OpenType font families.
13 April 2018
Radek Sidun, Šimon Matějka, Matej Vojtuš — TYPO Labs
[26:31] The Type Design and Typography studio at the UMPRUM Academy in Prague will present the results of the semestral research of variable fonts, which took place in the 2017 Winter semester.
The research had several aims. The primary aim was to become acquainted with innovation in detail, and to verify how far the proclaimed variability can reach. The secondary aim was to find out how students would utilise technical possibilities to realise their ideas of shape mutations of typeface families.
What would be however mostly interesting was whether students could impart an easily recognisable and utilisable character and “content” to such works.
Twelve new typefaces will presented by studio tutor Radek Sidun, together with curators Šimon Matějka and Matej Vojtuš.
13 April 2018
Laurence Penney — TYPO Labs
[42:29] Here in the font world we’re all fired up about variable fonts, yet we haven’t done much talking about them to typography’s new vanguard: CSS and JavaScript front-end developers. Laurence will share how he explains variable fonts to CSS-focussed audiences. Starting with the familiar (to us) wins in efficiency, tweakability and responsiveness (thx, DJR), he’ll go on to discuss efficient deployment techniques with fallback to static fonts. He’ll also call for a two-way dialogue, because we in the font world need to learn from web experts. We need their help not only with UI for variable fonts, but also for variable font commissions conceptually outside our traditional typographic backgrounds. Animated emoji are only the start!
12 April 2018
Jason Pamental — TYPO Labs
[45:33] For centuries, typography has shaped the way we ‘hear’ what we read. In our web work, though, we’ve had to balance our typographic desires with user experience and performance, knowing that every weight, width, or style of a typeface required a different file download. Variable fonts change that. Now, beautiful web typography can be crafted to respond to screen size, language setting, even ambient light. More than just a better version of what we had before, this new technology will challenge our notion of just what is good typography, and how it can push the practice forward in ways never before possible.
12 April 2018
Sahar Afshar, José Miguel Solé Bruning — TYPO Labs
[45:41] On Expanding Connections (AKA Making it Fit): In their talk Sahar Afshar and José Miguel Solé Bruning discuss the historic context and use of the Arabic extension, and demonstrate how, by using variable font technology, the long standing issue of organic extensions can be resolved to make possible a more dynamic typesetting for the Arabic script. While this talk focuses on the Arabic script, the methods can also be extended to other connecting writing systems, as well as Latin script styles.
12 April 2018
John Hudson — TYPO Labs
[42:43] The history of typography is the history of the adaptation of design to technological circumstances. When those circumstances are changing rapidly, a single typeface design may need to adapt in several new ways within a short period of time. Coming after a long period of effective technological stasis, variable font technology presents a challenge to designs that were not created with such circumstances in mind, or that were made for different circumstances with their own challenges. John Hudson presents three iterations of a single, complex script typeface adapted to three different circumstances, considering both specific details of the design and general points about process and tools.
12 April 2018
Gerry Leonidas — TYPO Labs
[28:50] Or, rather, giving form to peoples’ ideas about Variable Fonts. As for many technological innovations in typography before, the prize lies in the intersection of business and perception: meeting actual needs, while explaining to people how a new technology can be adopted, how it can improve their work, and reduce risk. At the same time, a new generation of professionals need to be trained to use the technology, and extend its utility. This talk is a mini reality check on how we verbalise and visualise Variable Fonts. Those who are not professional typeface designers, yet, are of particular interest.
10 April 2018
Andrey Kuzmin, Luc(as) de Groot — authors
Avisualizer for any variable font (just drag & drop). Works by creating an n-dimensional cube, where n is the number of axes in the font. Each axis is given a sepaarate colour. The cube can be manipulated directly by the pointer, or you can use axis sliders. Cubes of up to 14 dimensions have been tested. Source on GitHub
5 April 2018
Indra Kupferschmid — Google Docs
Spreadsheet that lists all the available variable fonts, whether open source, paid licenses, or installed with applications. Updated regularly.
27 March 2018
Johannes Lang — DrawBot Forum
Mattipa: Hi there! I wish there was a tutorial about how to animate a variable font and create a gif with drawbot. May I ask for this? Thanks a lot.
jo: hi there, I will try to give you a basic start with a very simple linear interpolation.
19 March 2018
Irene Vlachou — Type-Together
Halfway through the [Protipo] project we realised that these criteria [flexibility, precision, and fine-tuning … a wide variety of weights and styles] match perfectly with the new idea of OpenType font variations, and it would be a real benefit for the user to be able to manually adjust the font to their exact needs. … FeatureVariations allow character switching for typographic tweaks in specific regions of the design space. We call them “jumps” … Protipo Variable uses this technique for ten characters switching in three different values (at weight 400 $¢, at 440 €¥Q and at 600 Øøð), values appropriately tuned for each character.
13 March 2018
Greg Whitworth, Melanie Richards and Francois Remy — Microsoft
Join us on an expedition to learn about what variable fonts provide web developers and designers, and how to use them on your site. For the best experience, visit the Test Drive in a modern browser that supports font-variation-settings and font-optical-sizing, such as Microsoft Edge on Windows Insider Preview build 17120 or higher.
9 March 2018
Nick Sherman — V-Fonts.com
“Launching the beta version of a simple new website today for finding and trying #variablefonts: (Requires a browser that supports variable fonts.)”
8 March 2018
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer — Glyphs
Welcome to Variable Fonts in Glyphs! This tutorial covers a workflow for app version 2.5. Keep in mind that, while Glyphs can export working Variable Fonts, the implementation is currently in beta. Throughout this tutorial, I will point out where you still have to be careful.
23 February 2018
Mustafa Kurtuldu — Google Web Fundamentals
In this article, we will look at what variable fonts are, how we can use them in our work, and the potential possibilities they entail. But to understand what they offer, first, we must explore how typography and font loading currently work on the web.
29 January 2018
Ollie Williams — CSS-Tricks
In 2016, an important development in web typography was jointly announced by representatives from Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Version 1.8 of the OpenType font format introduced variable fonts. With so many big names involved, it's unsurprising that all browsers are on-board and racing ahead with implementation.
29 January 2018
Jason Pamental with Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier — Shop Talk Show
[1:04:55] We've got Jason Pamental on the show to educate us on variable typography and how it could be the biggest thing to come to the web since responsive design.
27 January 2018
Thomas Phinney — Phinney on Fonts
OK, this is kind of funny: a post I wrote in November 2016 that languished in my “drafts” afterwards when I was busy with work, waiting on illustrations/graphics that I never did add. Just for fun, I’m going ahead and publishing it exactly as is, showing what I was thinking at the time, just after Variable Fonts were announced. The only other note I want to add is that if you want to play with variable fonts, check out Axis-Praxis.
25 January 2018
Richard Rutter — Clearleft
“Using variable fonts in the real world turns out to be tricky. This post explains how we achieved it for the new Ampersand website and what we learned along the way.” — a thorough exploration of the CSS techniques needed to code a real-world website using variable fonts.
23 January 2018
Mandy Michael — Talk.CSS Singapore
[40:02] So let’s have some fun with text! In this talk, the speaker will show you how to make effects with accessible, searchable, and selectable text (Without the need for complicated markup or JavaScript). Sometimes it’s easy to forget the power of CSS but there is a lot you can do with a little creativity. Variable fonts are covered from 22:31.
14 January 2018
Mandy Michael — Codepen
I've started a collection on @CodePen of all the fun I'm having with variable fonts. #variablefonts — @Mandy_Kerr on Twitter
10 January 2018
Jason Pamental — Codepen
A collection of small demo samples of variable font capabilities.
8 January 2018
Anna Monus — Envato Web Design Tutorials
Variable fonts significantly reduce the limitations of current font formats. Today’s web fonts are inflexible and don’t scale very well; they only provide us with some fixed styles with names like “Light”, “Bold”, or “Extra Bold”. There are even typefaces that only have one weight or slant variant. With variable fonts however, we have access to an infinite flexibility of weight, slant, x-height, slabs, rounding, and other typographical attributes.
7 December 2017
Roel Nieskens — Pixel Ambacht
With support for variable fonts inching closer, let’s take a look at what variable fonts are and what they can do. And what better way to demo cutting edge typographic web technology than through silly hover effects? … But if you go beyond those two weights, if you allow this to unlock typographic possibilities previously limited by crude technological constraints, then variable fonts are a dream come true. Browser support is coming real soon, and it brings the future of web typography.
6 December 2017
Allan Haley — Communication Arts
Variable fonts are a hot topic. This new variety of fonts is being heralded by typophiles as virtually the second coming of movable type … enthusiasm—on the edge of ebullience—rules the day … Variable fonts will be important and will change how some of us work, but they are far from the contributions of Johannes Gutenberg, Ottmar Mergenthaler, and even [the Bentons]. The primary benefit of variable fonts is maximizing bandwidth and load time in websites … What should you do? For now, watch and wait.
30 November 2017
Laurence Penney — dotCSS
[19:46] Laurence explains the manifold benefits for the web: responsive type within responsive design, reduced webfont payload, and much more. He shows how to explore the possibilities of Variable Fonts using his Axis-Praxis website and other tools, encourages dialogue with font makers to make sure they’re making the responsive fonts you need, and explains how to deploy Variable Fonts in real projects.
22 November 2017
Peter Constable — Type Drawers / GitHub
Announcment of the “OpenType Design Variation Axis Tags” GitHub repository where be proposals for new OpenType Variations registered axes should be submitted.
18 November 2017
Jason Pamental — NEDcamp 2017
[58:16] Variable fonts are here, and will change everything: with a single font file that can scale in size, width, weight and even x-height—exactly as the type designer envisioned. Everything from super-fine-line delicacy to the chunkiest slab headlines; wide widths in banners and slightly narrower body copy for better line lengths on mobile devices. All controllable with CSS. (This is an evolution of my talk at DrupalCon Baltimore earlier this year, with lots of new content.)
6 November 2017
David Jonathan Ross — Type@Cooper
[1:03:02] The new OpenType variable font format will redefine what it means to make and use a typeface family; in this new format, a single font file can contain multiple weights, widths, optical sizes, and more! I will discuss the development of type families in the 20th and 21st centuries, and share my own experience creating large series of type. I will illustrate why variable fonts have the potential to influence this creative process, and in doing so how they may affect the relationship between type maker and type user.
23 October 2017
Jason Pamental — Medium
It’s a few weeks on from ATypI Montréal, and between that event, TypeCon in Boston just before, and more recent announcements at AdobeMAX, there’s a lot to talk about with Variable Fonts.
21 October 2017
Matthew Butterick — Butterick’s Practical Typography
An update to his article that was originally published in September 2016: “[the efforts of Adobe, Microsoft, Apple and Google], a mediocre effort. So far, OT Font Variations are not emitting the aroma of aggressive action, but rather the milder scent of bets being hedged. The brightest sign is the web-browser support. … But the darkest sign is the lack of useful fonts built with OT Font Variations technology.”
19 October 2017
Dan Rhatigan — Adobe Typekit Blog
Photoshop and Illustrator announced plenty of new features at Adobe MAX this week, include some exciting typographic features we’ve been anticipating: support for OpenType variable fonts. … We chose six families to best show what the new format will allow … Myriad Variable Concept, Acumin Variable Concept, allows you to adjust weight, width, and even the slant angle, combining all of Acumin’s 90 variants in a single dynamic font file … Minion Variable Concept … Source Sans Variable, Source Serif Variable, and Source Code Variable …
17 October 2017
Peter Constable — Internationalization and Unicode Conferences
The recent introduction of OpenType 1.8 makes it possible to create a single font that can show very different appearances based on user choices. One font has multiple “axes” allowing a fluid, continuous mutation of glyph shapes. This makes it possible for one font to have multiple weights and stresses, in a compact representation that can save considerable space compared to separate fonts. But OpenType 1.8 allows more than just this mutation, which has been around for 30 years already in the form of Apple’s AAT Variations or Adobe’s Multiple Masters. Using OpenType 1.8, it is possible, for instance, to make a font with a “Time” axis, where you can show how the shapes of glyphs have changed over time. Choosing alternates via GSUB substitutions can be given a user interface via this mechanism. This talk will go over OpenType 1.8 and all its capabilities, with live demos showing off some fonts of interest.
25 September 2017
Jason Pamental — FITC Web Unleashed 2017
[32:35] Variable fonts are here, and will change everything: with a single font file that can scale in size, width, weight and even x-height—exactly as the type designer envisioned. Everything from super-fine-line delicacy to the chunkiest slab headlines; wide widths in banners and slightly narrower body copy for better line lengths on mobile devices. All controllable with CSS. … Jason will look at the technology behind variable fonts, how to use them on the web, their timeline for release, and most importantly: their impact on the dynamic range of our designs.
18 September 2017
François Poizat — Smashing Magazine
There’s no question, the future of web typography looks promising … Unfortunately, variable fonts don’t solve every problem with responsive web typography. For example, how do we reduce the number of media queries? How do we handle outliers? How do we make the typeface a part of the web page?
Parametric fonts are intended to fix these issues … Prototypo … The question now is, What would you do if you could morph typefaces to your every whim?
16 September 2017
Sahar Afshar — ATypI Montréal
[17:29] “This talk will look at methods of designing Arabic typefaces with a new voice … The presentation will conclude with a hypothesis of technological advancements that can eliminate the limitations and current constraints in Arabic typesetting and design.” — demonstration of an experimental variable font that has an axis to adjust the width of the kashida.
14 September 2017
Santiago Orozco — ATypI Montréal
[25:17] Type design has always had a relationship with technology, and now with variable fonts there are lots of opportunities in that relationship to make type design more exciting than ever. Variable fonts are not only about designing letterforms and making them look good, but about creating systems that offer, to all kinds of users, their own level of interactivity defined by the type designer, manipulated by designers, and consumed by the users. But what will these systems look like, for each of these groups of people? This presentation will look at what is possible with all interfaces for designing, manipulating, and consuming variable fonts.
14 September 2017
Peter Constable — ATypI Montréal
[23:41] Since the OpenType variable font format was announced at ATypI 2016, there has been growing interest and excitement in this format. This talk will aim to clarify the inner workings of variable fonts, as well as reviewing progress since last year’s ATypI announcement.
14 September 2017
Yves Peters, Vinod Balakrishnan — ATypI Montréal
[18:40] Yves updates us on the activity of the Adobe Typography Customer Advisory Board … leading the effort to improve the typographic interface across all Adobe apps. Vinod gives us a surprise preview of variable font support in Photoshop.
31 August 2017
Roger Black — Type Magazine
We’ve been hearing about OpenType Variations.
Where did they come from, and where are they going?
25 August 2017
Andrew Johnson — A List Apart
Variable fonts give us a new, wide open typographic space with which to work. Instead of prescribing value to individual UI elements in a vacuum, we should take a hybrid and calculated approach to variable font interfaces. How do we structure our design tools to adapt to the new advantages variable fonts provide us with? … Interfaces for variable fonts should adapt along with the fonts themselves. There’s no single static UI pattern that will work as the best solution for all variable fonts.
2 August 2017
David Berlow — Type Network
We’re excited to present the second installment of our publications related to variable fonts. The first installment, which told the stories of Amstelvar and Decovar, showed us beginning to work with variable fonts—imagining, designing, and producing them. Since then, code and browsers have evolved to support the new format, allowing us to start using variable fonts. Naturally, thinking and writing about variations in the context of history and the future can’t be far behind.
18 July 2017
Ricardo Magalhães — Medium: Prototypr
In a live video conference Behdad presents his proposals for improving the OpenType/Open Font Format. A fundamental change is to increase the maximum number of glyphs in a font from 2^16 (2 bytes, =65,536) to 2^24 (3 bytes, =16,777,216), a limitation that goes back to the early 1990s and that font makers are coming up against. Another proposal is to allow cubic Bézier curves in TrueType-style glyphs. Regarding variations, Behdad proposes:
avar table, satisfying the need for axis interdependence (one axis influencing others)9 June 2017
Thomas Phinney — Kerning 2017
[34:39] In the early 1990s, Adobe and Apple independently developed Multiple Master fonts and GX Variations, competing axis-based font technologies. By 2000, Adobe had abandoned MM, and GX Variations had minimal support in the marketplace. Yet in 2016, an unprecedented alliance of Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Google announced Variable Fonts (OpenType Variations), a successor to these arguably failed technologies. What makes axis-based fonts so exciting? How do they free type and graphic designers to do new things? Why did they fail before, and why might Variable Fonts succeed when its predecessors failed? FontLab’s Thomas Phinney shows the potential of Variable Fonts from useful workhorses to the silly and bizarre.
9 June 2017
Bianca Berning — ISType
[25:22] Let’s look beyond the obvious benefit of variable fonts, the greatly-reduced file size, and explore their potential impact on typography. How can OpenType Font Variations assist the reader? How can they improve responsive typography?
9 June 2017
Bianca Berning — Alphabettes.org
As soon as variable fonts are more widely implemented we will see that they can have an impact on our reading experiences that goes beyond faster web loading. I hope this article managed to give an overview of a small selection of opportunities we have at hand to change the way we read on screen. And I’m hopeful that we are one step closer to typography that is not only responsive to how and where the text is read but also to who is reading it.
8 June 2017
Khoi Vinh, Dan Rhatigan — Print Magazine
It’s really the demands of the faster, more powerful digital world around us that’s requiring our fonts to become smaller and that’s requiring a more sophisticated means of delivering typeface designs to people … the likelihood of a variety of new approaches to application UI both excites me and scares me a little … the business outcomes are still anyone’s guess. Every type designer I’ve talked to about this has had a different theory, but since we’re a ways off from widespread support, it will be a while before foundries test the waters and some patterns emerge.
7 June 2017
Laurence Penney — Axis-Praxis
“I animated #Muybridge’s horse using a variable font. Try it yourself (variable browsers only) at https://www.axis-praxis.org/playground/horse/ #cssanimation”
11 May 2017
Peter Constable, Shrinath Shanbhag — Microsoft
[31:59] The OpenType font format has been extended with an exciting new technology, OpenType Font Variations. An OpenType variable font is a single font that can behave like many separate fonts by supporting continuous variation between different designs defined in the font. This is the biggest development in OpenType since the introduction of OpenType itself! In this video, we give an overview of OpenType variable fonts, show how some of the capabilities of variable fonts may already be accessible in your existing apps, and describe new DirectWrite APIs that will enable you to take advantage of the full capabilities of this new OpenType format.
11 May 2017
Yves Peters — Type Network
Yes, TYPO Labs 2017 tackled more than just variable fonts—but the new technology maintained a constant presence in the background.
25 April 2017
Jason Pamental — DrupalCon Baltimore 2017
[50:54] Make no mistake: variable fonts will have a more significant impact on web design than anything since responsive design itself. Learn how you can use them today and be ahead of the web tomorrow.
18 April 2017
Yves Peters — Type Network
The sophomore edition of TYPO Labs was even bigger and better than the first—and jam-packed with enough stimulating content to make your head spin … The variable font format may not yet be ready for commercial applications, but the presentations confirmed that the type community is diving headfirst into the OpenType 1.8 specification, fearlessly experimenting with variable fonts for the ultimate benefit of end users.
10 April 2017
Antje Dohmann — PAGE
Kaum ein Vortrag, der nicht die zwei Wörter Variable Fonts im Titel trug. Und dass, obwohl es kaum wirklich Neues gibt. Jedenfalls nicht öffentlich, intern arbeitet die Schriftindustrie mit Hochdruck an der Weiterentwicklung der Techniken und der Lösung von Problemen.
8 April 2017
John Hudson — TYPO Labs
[51:15] Now that variable fonts have (re)introduced interpolable variation into the OpenType format, how else might the technology be used to improve specific aspects of micro-typographic layout? John Hudson presents a series of examples of possible nested glyph variation within font-level variation, some of which are already under consideration as extensions to the existing variable font technology. These examples include improvements to efficiency of CJK glyph storage, complex script shaping, justification, and mathematical typesetting. There are significant challenges to implementing these extensions, but the potential benefits are compelling.
8 April 2017
Adam Twardoch, Matthew Rechs, David Berlow, Ivo Gabrowitsch, Alexandra Korolkova — TYPO Labs
[50:06] Panel discussion
8 April 2017
Peter Constable, Rob McKaughan — TYPO Labs
Peter Constable will update everyone on the current plans and ideas for variable fonts in the OpenType specification (version 1.8.1 and beyond). He will also describe the latest features in Microsoft products, including demos. Rob McKaughan will brainstorm uses for variable fonts beyond responsive typography.
8 April 2017
Marianna Paszkowska — TYPO Labs
[23:34] Marianna Paszkowska delivered an overview of interactive designs from a not type related field. The audience got the “warning” to now get confronted with images that had nothing to do with type. She explained the importance of thinking outside the box, and inspired to learn about intelligent textiles, or dynamic bags, that are reacting to their environment. Following the idea of the products reaction on for example the weather, she concluded the excursion with the great interactive type design Project Twin by Letteror. (Includes a nice demo of a FF Clifford variable prototype.)
8 April 2017
Laurence Penney — TYPO Labs
[55:58] In the weeks after the OpenType 1.8 announcement about variable fonts at ATypI 2016, despite explanatory texts and videos there was no environment for enthusiasts and font-makers to experience variable fonts in practice. The following month, Laurence’s Axis-Praxis website fulfilled the need for such a place, somewhere to experiment with your own fonts and to play with fonts that others had released. The site has developed into a resource for fonts, user interfaces, ideas about the future of variable fonts, and reminders of similar activity in font technology a generation ago. Laurence will talk about what he’s learned so far, and will present Axis-Praxis Version 2.
7 April 2017
Tom Rickner, Bob Taylor — TYPO Labs
[52.49] The dream was to create a tool where you could insert nearly any font family and have a variable font pop out the other end, with virtually no work involved. The reality is not so simple. This talk describes a number of considerations involved in assessing font families for suitability, preparing them for conversion, making the outlines point compatible, and then actually producing high-quality variable fonts that meet the OpenType 1.8.1 standard.
6 April 2017
Adam Twardoch — TYPO Labs
[48:05] Thousands of font sources exist today which were designed in FontLab Studio, Glyphs or RoboFont with Superpolator, which makes it relatively easy for font foundries to re-release them as variable OpenType fonts. The OpenType Variations model is conceptually and technically quite similar to TrueType GX, MutatorMath and MultipleMaster, but there are some important differences in detail. In this talk, Adam will talk about those differences and will give tips on how to technically approach the conversion of font sources into variable TTFs and OTFs. He’ll discuss differences in the design space setup, caveats about glyph compatibility and feature variation, challenges regarding predefined instances and backwards-compatibility with existing static font families.
6 April 2017
Dan Rhatigan — TYPO Labs
[40:56] Since last September’s announcement of the new OpenType 1.8 spec, variable fonts have been moving from concepts and demos into practical solutions. This overview will summarize the progress made so far on new fonts, the environments that can support them, and what some designers have already learned to do with them.
1 April 2017
Callie Budrick, Dan Rhatigan — Print magazine
If you’re working in the typography world, you may have heard the whisperings of collaboration between some of the biggest names in technology. Adobe, Apple, Google and Microsoft have been working together (with the help of independent type foundries and designers) to create something that’s going to change the way we see type—literally. They’re called variable fonts, and Dan Rhatigan took the time to tell us everything we needed to know about them.
30 March 2017
Paul Boag, Rich Rutter — Boagworld
[1:05:42] This week on the Boagworld Show we talk variable fonts, dealing with bad people and whether we need to reconsider CAPTCHA.
28 March 2017
Ilya Ruderman — TypeToday
Variable fonts are a new font format that will fundamentally change future typography. They are already available to use, but are still not widely known.
27 March 2017
Mike Duggan — Microsoft
The latest version of VTT (6.20) allows for the easy addition of hinting to Variable Fonts … One set of hints covers all masters in the font.
28 February 2017
Bob Taylor — Monotype
The OpenType 1.8.1 spec for variable fonts is new and we are just learning how to create these fonts from existing families. Our hope is to have lots of font families converted to variable fonts. Some may only have one weight axis, some two or three axes. Perhaps we will have different combinations with different design space ranges available so customers can choose what best meets their needs. There is a lot of promise provided by variables fonts and a lot of work ahead. We are only at the beginning.
23 February 2017
David Sudweeks — FontShop
When reports of new experimentation with the old TrueType GX standard came last year, I was hopeful this might at some point emerge as a new font format, (and I wasn’t alone). What I didn’t suspect was that this variable font technology would become part of OpenType itself. So here’s a quick look at what OpenType is capable of since version 1.8 was announced last fall.
21 February 2017
Richard Rutter — Medium
Variable fonts are a new font format offering unprecedented flexibility. And they are with us now. [This is an updated extract from Richard Rutter’s forthcoming book, Web Typography.]
16 February 2017
Patrick Fultz — Target Marketing
Like an Avengers team of typography heroes, Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Google have joined forces to support a new standard called OpenType 1.8. So what’s the big deal? … Now we can condense or extend glyphs (specific shapes of letters), customizing them for a specific look. We can sharpen or round a typeface, shorten the descenders, or raise a font’s x-height in our never-ending pursuit of truth, justice and the perfect layout … The biggest companies behind operating systems, design and the Web have all collaborated on the new format. Notable independent contributors are already refining their type standards. It’s a brave new world ahead.
9 February 2017
Creative Cloud Team — Adobe Creative Cloud
Getting type both to look good and load quickly is a common challenge for designers and developers … With OpenType Variable Fonts, type designers will be able to design and sell a font that flexes for designers and readers in the same ways that the type designers intended. With variations possible across 64,000 axes, the options are endless … less likely to commit type cripes like stretching, faux bolding, slanting … One file can do the work of what you previously needed many files to do.
8 February 2017
Jason Tselentis, Tom Rickner — How Magazine
With OpenType 1.8—soon to be updated to 1.8.1—a whole new world of typography will be available to designers and users. The new wave of variable fonts promises a whole new typographic world of opportunities, and Monotype’s Tom Rickner is excited about the possibilities.
30 January 2017
Ethan Marcotte, Tim Brown, Bram Stein — RWD
[28:11] Variable fonts are coming. How will it change the web design and development process? Tim Brown and Bram Stein explain how variable fonts will work and what you can do with them now: “You can think about it as responsive design brought down to the level of the font file itself.”
16 December 2016
David Berlow — Font Bureau
Following the mid-September announcement of OpenType v1.8, Font Bureau takes on extreme font development challenge for Google.
8 December 2016
Tom Rickner — Monotype
What exactly needs to happen? Operating systems need to add support for a number of newly defined data structures. Application developers need to enable support for selecting variable font styles. CSS standards need to expand to enable the specifying of variable font styles. Font tool developers need to update their tools to output variable fonts. Type designers and font producers have to actually make the fonts. Font markets need to make variable fonts available.
29 November 2016
Tom Rickner — Monotype
Tom Rickner, veteran type designer, shares his personal role in the beginnings of type’s most exciting development in decades.
…
This new approach to storing outlines that represent a design space was incredibly powerful, and broke down some significant barriers and limitations in Adobe’s approach.
…
While the announcement represents what I truly believe has been an unprecedented degree of collaboration across the industry, there is still much work to be done. … We will be sharing more of our thoughts and research on this in the coming days, weeks and months.
26 November 2016
Nick Sherman — Typographische Gesellschaft München
[40:45]
21 November 2016
Andrew Johnson — Typeshift
Andrew Johnson announces that the Typeshift app now supports variable fonts. Typeshift is a Mac app for web typesetting, where you can find fonts from various services and develop web layouts.
2 November 2016
Myles Maxfield — WebKit Blog
The W3C is currently drafting a way to describe variation axis values in CSS … CSS properties …font-weight, font-stretch, font-style, and font-size … optical-sizing … font-variation-settings … TrueType has had variation support for many years. In fact, all of the operating systems Apple ships currently include system APIs for TrueType font variations. Because of this, I have started implementing font variation support in WebKit in relation to the existing TrueType font support in the platform. Currently, I’ve only implemented the lowest-level font-variation-settings property, but I’m very excited to implement the complete support as soon as I’m able. Please try the existing support out in a Safari Technology Preview only on macOS Sierra and let me know how it works for you!
31 October 2016
Baptiste Guesnon — baptisteguesnon.eu
A wide-ranging discussion of the benefits of dynamic typography: “Aujourd’hui, le texte est mobile, changeant... les contenus et les formes sont en perpétuelle métamorphose. Pourtant la typographie que nous utilisons, bien que numérique, est pensée comme un matériau statique … La typographie dynamique changera la vision que nous avons d’une fonte et de la composition du texte. … l’émergence d’un nouveau souffle dans le champ graphique et typographique.”
28 October 2016
Laurence Penney — Axis-Praxis
[5:04] Axis-Praxis is a tool for playing with Variable Fonts in the browser. It’s a simple typesetting environment where you can choose fonts, adjust sliders, and press buttons for Named Instances to obtain precise settings on the variations axes built into the fonts. You can also click the axis buttons for an animation along the entire axis. When you begin you will find, pre-installed in the font menu, the four variable fonts built into macOS Sierra. At any point you can play with your own fonts by just dragging & dropping the TTF file onto the page.
28 October 2016
Laurence Penney — Axis-Praxis
Axis-Praxis is a web tool for playing with Variable Fonts. It’s a simple typesetting environment where you can choose fonts, adjust sliders, and press buttons for Named Instances to obtain precise settings on the variations axes built into the fonts. You can also click the axis buttons for an animation along the entire axis. When you begin you will find, pre-installed in the font menu, the four variable fonts built into macOS Sierra. At any point you can play with your own fonts by just dragging & dropping the TTF file onto the page
14 October 2016
Travis Kochel — GitHub
Guide to making variable fonts with the open source fontTools toolchain. Works on a collection of master fonts in UFO format, in conjunction with a .designspace file that defines how the fonts relate to each other in a multidimensional design space. Updated several times since original publication.
12 October 2016
Jeff Veen, Tim Brown — Presentable
[46:22] This week’s special guest is my friend Tim Brown, Head of Typography at Adobe. We discuss the recent announcement of Variable Fonts and what that means for type on the web, the complexity of CSS, and the future of responsive web design.
30 September 2016
Myles Maxfield — Litherum
“Try opening this in a recent Safari nightly build.” With these words Safari developer Myles Maxfield introduces the first public demo showing variable fonts working in a web browser. And not just working, but fonts that get new variation settings applied dozens of times per second, thanks to CSS animation. The browser needed is the latest version of WebKit Nightly, a cutting-edge version of Safari for Mac.
24 September 2016
Robin Rendle — Adventures in Typography
It began with a post by John Hudson, then Tim Brown wrote about the news over on the Typekit blog, and then Roel Nieskens described the benefits on Typographica. And then, heck, even Wired wrote about the news. But why is this such a big deal?
22 September 2016
Myles Maxfield — Litherum
Recently, the CSS Working Group in the W3C resolved to pursue adding support for variable fonts within CSS. A draft has been added to the CSS Fonts Level 4 spec. Your questions and comments are extremely appreciated, and will help shape the future of variation fonts support in CSS! … Here is what CSS would look like using the current draft…
22 September 2016
Roel Nieskens — Typographica
The introduction of variable fonts is a milestone in digital type history, which was rooted in metal type for a frustratingly long time — at least in the eyes of a computer-nerd type lover like myself. Type has finally adapted to the flexible nature of our screens and the technology that fills them with content.
22 September 2016
Megan Molteni — Wired Magazine
Engineers at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe have spent years developing that infrastructure, and the companies expect quick adoption. Google's open source font production pipeline supports variable fonts, and Google hopes to bring it to Chrome and other products ASAP. Adobe expects to release an updated tool for building variable fonts by the end of the month. And Microsoft says it will support variable fonts on all of its products by next year. And designers like Phinney are assembling variable fonts right now, eager for the day when everything, everywhere, is responsive.
20 September 2016
Matthew Butterick — Butterick’s Practical Typography
Without diminishing the effort that’s been put into this new standard, I’m not convinced there’s a plausible rationale for it. It would impose significant costs on type designers, provide no obvious advantage to our customers, and mostly benefit a small set of wealthy corporate sponsors. John Hudson responded to the article on Type Drawers. Matthew Butterick updated his own article in October 2017.
19 September 2016
David Berlow — Type Network
I‘m really very happy to see the public display of support for font variations by so many major developers, and such a great public display of interest from so many font developers. Partial full disclosure—the morning after the announcement had been made last week at ATypI 2016 in Warsaw, I woke up with Handel‘s “Variations Chorus” playing in my head, knowing that these announcements had been made while I slept.
14 September 2016
Tim Brown — Adobe Typekit Blog
Imagine condensing or extending glyph widths ever so slightly, to accommodate narrow and wide viewports. Imagine raising your favorite font’s x-height just a touch at small sizes. Imagine sharpening or rounding your brand typeface in ways its type designer intended, for the purposes of art direction. Imagine shortening descenders imperceptibly so that headings can be set nice and tight without letters crashing into one another. Imagine this all happening live on the web, as a natural part of responsive design.
14 September 2016
David Lemon, Peter Constable, Behdad Esfahbod, Ned Holbrook, Simon Daniels — ATypI
[1:18:58] The announcement of the OpenType 1.8 specification at ATypI 2016 Warsaw, focussing on font variations. Representatives from Adobe, Microsoft, Apple and Google each spoke.
14 September 2016
John Hudson — Medium
Version 1.8 of the OpenType font format specification introduces an extensive new technology, affecting almost every area of the format. An OpenType variable font is one in which the equivalent of multiple individual fonts can be compactly packaged within a single font file. This is done by defining variations within the font, which constitute a single- or multi-axis design space within which many font instances can be interpolated. A variable font is a single font file that behaves like multiple fonts.
14 September 2016
multiple authors — Microsoft
Version 1.8 of the OpenType specification introduces font variations. In the OpenType font file, the fvar table defines axes and named instances. Glyph morphing is defined in the gvar table (in TrueType fonts, with files usually with the extension .ttf), and in the CFF2 table (in fonts with PostScript outlines, files usually with the extension .otf). Various other tables define changes in spacing, kerning, and substitutions that happen in certain regions of the design space.
10 May 2016
Behdad Esfahbod — TYPO Labs
[29:57] Since ATypI 2014, I and a few other people have independently proposed that OpenType should be extended to support runtime font variations à la TrueType GX and Adobe Multiple Master. In this session I will present what has been done in the last year and a half to move towards that vision.
10 May 2016
Tom Rickner — TYPO Labs
[44:45] TrueType Variations was developed at Apple Computer in the early 1990’s, during the height of the “Font Wars”, as a response to Adobe’s Multiple Master font format. This incredibly powerful format briefly flourished as a design tool, before dying in the marketplace for a host of reasons. Renewed interest by designers and software developers alike has resulted in a rebirth of sorts. This talk will discuss lessons learned, current capabilities and limitations of Variations, and will conclude with a vision for what the future of this exciting technology could bring.
1 February 2016
Behdad Esfahbod — Behdad Esfahbod
A key document in the revival of OpenType variations, being the proposal from Behdad Esfahbod of Google stating the intent tim implement the technology..
“Let's revive and revise TrueType GX font variations, and integrate it with OpenType. In common terms this enables run-time interpolation between font masters, also known as dynamic interpolation. There are two main benefits to doing this: 1. font file size savings, specially on mobile devices, and 2. making the entire gamut of weight, width, etc available to users, not just a series of interpolated instances.”
21 November 2015
Adam Twardoch — Type Drawers
A progress report on the efforts of “our little working group” to revive GX variations.
Then, nothing happened for a long time — until early 2015, where the said informal working group has taken the notion of variable fonts into focus. Then, I’ve used FontForge to build some experimental GX fonts out of available opensource font sources. I’ve ran into various problems, but some testing and experimentation, along with some clarifications provided by the Apple folks, have allowed the group to identify the “underspecified” aspects of GX, and implement them cleanly in FreeType. So that since earlier this year, FreeType can correctly render Skia and some other experimentally made GX fonts.
10 November 2015
Erik van Blokland — Letterror
Responsive Lettering is a system for scalable, interpolating vector shapes that can
make themselves fit in a range of rectangles. It is intended for publication on the web using SVG for the vector outlines and the snap.js JavaScript library to manipulate them. Source shapes should be in UFO format, so Robofont is typically used to draw them. All code is on GitHub.
13 June 2015
Thomas Phinney — ISType
[42:57] There were several attempts to come up with a next-generation digital font format in the 1990s. Why did OpenType (mostly) succeed where GX/AAT and multiple masters did not? Thomas explores the factors that caused GX and MM to fail in the marketplace, and explains why OpenType didn’t suffer the same fate thanks to a combination of accidents of birth, and lessons painfully learned from the previous format battles. Corporate alliances, attention to support and workflows, openness, and tireless evangelism all played their parts.
19 February 2015
Adam Twardoch — FontLab
[1:55] Adam Twardoch reminds us how Skia, the TrueType GX Variations font that ships on all Macs since 1994, behaved in OS X TextEdit until Apple disabled the Variations dropdown in the Typography panel. Also watch Erik van Blokland’s TrueType GX font, Jam
15 February 2015
Nick Sherman — Robothon
[41:58] Nick Sherman expands on the many advantages of variable fonts on the web that he described in his A List Apart article.
23 January 2015
Nick Sherman — A List Apart
The much-cited article that captured the need for a new variable font format for the web: “The lobotomization of dynamic type systems is especially disappointing in the context of CSS—a system that has variable stylization in its DNA. … A variable font would mean less bandwidth, fewer round-trips to the server, faster load times, and decidedly more typographic flexibility. It’s a win across the board.”
20 January 2015
Andrew Johnson — A List Apart
We all want to design great typographic experiences. We also want to serve users on an increasing range of devices and contexts. But today’s webfonts tie our responsive sites and applications to inflexible type that doesn’t scale. As a result, our users get poor reading experiences and longer loading times from additional font weights … With live font interpolation, we can bring the same level of finesse to our sites and applications that type designers do … get involved in the discussion, contribute to projects like opentype.js, and let type designers know there’s a demand for interpolatable fonts.
19 September 2014
Erik van Blokland — Letterror
The story of MutatorMath, the interpolation engine inside Superpolator — with due credit to Peter Karow, the Noordzij cube and TrueType GX variations.
12 August 2014
Dave Crossland — Google+
[46:16] Type technologist Ben Bauermeister invented the PANOSE type classification scheme in the 1980s, built and sold a successful font technology start up that synthesised fonts based on the scheme in the 90s -- and he's agreed to do a very rare public appearance to explain the history of this idea.
30 July 2014
Tamye Riggs — Adobe Typekit Blog
The story of Adobe Multiple Master fonts: what they did well, why they failed. Tamye writes “In 1991, the multiple master format was introduced as an extension to PostScript Type 1. Multiple master fonts, or MM fonts, were built with two or more design masters — outline typeface styles — with font “instances” generated through interpolation along one or more design axes (such as weight, width, and optical size). MM fonts allowed end users greater flexibility and more precise control of their typography than was possible with standard PostScript fonts.”
20 June 2013
Adam Twardoch — W3C public-webfonts-wg list
A proposal for a variable font model for the web: “in the web context, I think at least one of [multiple master and TrueType GX] deserves resurrection — because it offers tremendous compression potentials, lends itself well into the “responsive web” paradigm, offers new possibilities for text layout on the web and, above all, can be implemented much more easily on the web than it ever could be on desktop platforms”.
3 March 2005
Ben Kiel — Typographica
Erik van Blokland demonstrated the Superpolator (Super-imposed Interpolation). Simply put, it is an application that allows for a more flexible way of dealing with multiple masters, though it isn’t as interface friendly as FontLab’s way. The power of the Superpolator is that it allows an infinite number of axes and an infinite number of masters. You can have odd numbers of masters (intermediate masters) and even glyph specific masters. You can interpolate multiple times, maintaining as much precision as possible by not rounding point coordinates until the end. … Right now, the Superpolator is a code-base resting on top of RoboFab and requires a bit of programming — about as much as it takes to use RoboFab — to use it.
23 March 2004
George Williams — freetype-devel list
After a good deal of effort (mostly trying to find someone at Apple
who knew anything about it), I believe I finally understand the workings of Apple’s ‘gvar’ table and friends ([acfg]var). Is there any interest in adding support for Apple’s distortable fonts
to FreeType? I can provide code to interpret Apple’s tables, but I’d rather have someone who understands the TrueType rasterizer (better than I) undertake the changes to that. Is anyone interested in volunteering?
7 September 1995
Adobe staff — Adobe Systems Inc.
Type 1 multiple master typefaces represent a revolutionary breakthrough in font technology that gives graphic designers and desktop publishers the ability to customize fonts for specific needs. The typographic flexibility that multiple master typefaces provide to users is a significant advantage over previous technologies. To offer users more choices incorporating this flexibility, a variety of multiple master typefaces are currently under development. To encourage further creative application of multiple master technology, Adobe Systems has compiled these basic design guidelines and conventions for creating new typefaces or for “retrofitting” existing families in multiple master format.
1 January 1995
Kenneth Trueman — Kenneth Trueman
QuickDraw GX was the graphics system that Apple introduced in 1994, and variable fonts (or “fonts with GX variations”) were part of that. For about two years up until 1997, Kenneth Trueman operated the QuickDraw GX Fan Club, a website which became a kind of directory of all things GX. That included the fonts, the utilities that made the fonts, and the applications where you could use the fonts. Much of that website is still online.
1 October 1994
Erfert Fenton — MacWorld
QuickDraw GX, Apple's long-awaited graphical extension to the Macintosh Operating System, supports an enhanced font architecture that infuses typefaces with a host of new capabilities … quicken the pulse of any digital-type aficionado. … QuickDraw GX fonts can support style variations similar to those of Adobe's Multiple Master fonts. For example, a GX font might allow the user to adjust style axes for width, weight, or optical scaling. Skia, one of the GX fonts included with System 7.5, allows the user to adjust character width and weight.
15 May 1994
Adobe staff — Adobe Systems Inc.
This supplement describes … the multiple master font format, which was previously described in Technical Note #5086, “Multiple Master Extensions to the Adobe Type 1 Font Format.” … A multiple master font contains from 2 to 16 master designs in a single font, from which users may interpolate a large number of intermediate font instances. This format, discussed in section 3, provides the potential for unprecedented flexibility and control over typographic parameters.
14 February 1992
Adobe staff — Adobe Systems Inc.
This technical note presents the format for multiple master Type 1 font programs. The multiple master font format is an extension of the Type 1 font format, which allows the generation of a wide variety of typeface styles from a single font program. This capability allows users and applications unprecedented control over the typographic parameters of fonts used in their documents. A multiple master font program contains two or more outline typefaces called master designs, which describe one or more design axes. The master designs that constitute a design axis represent a dynamic range of one typo- graphic parameter, such as the weight or width. This range of styles is defined in a multiple master font program by specifying one master design to repre- sent each end of an axis, such as a light and extra-bold weight, as well as any intermediate master designs that are required. The maximum number of master designs allowed is sixteen.
11 March 1991
Kristi Coale, Barbara Darrow — InfoWorld
Adobe Systems Inc. has announced a technology that will give designers and end-users more control over typeface appearance. Spanning the Macintosh, Windows, and Unix platforms, Multiple Master technology lets designers and end-users generate several custom variations of a single typeface. Each variation remains faithful to the underlying character shapes, though changing in width, weight, size, and style. The result, according to Adobe, is “aesthetically correct” and does not distort the characters. Due out by year’s end.
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