It's Nice That: When did variable fonts come to be, and why have they taken off recently?

Variable font technology is actually not that new. Adobe and Apple independently developed multiple master fonts and GX variations in the early 1990s, both were axis-based technologies similar to variable fonts. Adobe abandoned multiple master fonts by 2000, and GX Variations only ever had minimal support. This all changed when Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, and a few independent foundries and typeface design studios, including Dalton Maag, came together to announce that OpenType Font Variations (better known as variable fonts) would be added to the OpenType specification mid-2016.

Since then, type designers have created hundreds of variable fonts, some experimental, testing the boundaries of the technology, and others highly functional, aimed at improving web performance.

Support for variable fonts has improved over the last couple of years, now covering all major web browsers, operating systems and key applications like Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Sketch. Figma and Quark Xpress also have support on their roadmaps. These updates have made variable fonts much more accessible to designers.

From Dalton Maag’s perspective, we’ve been experimenting with variable fonts since their early days. We released our first variable library font, Venn, in 2018. Since then, we’ve released three more variable font families, Objektiv, Mokoko, and Aktiv Grotesk, with another one coming out next month. Variable fonts broaden what our clients – users and designers – can do with type, whether it’s very expressive and bold, or simple and functional. That’s led to an increased interest in our variable library fonts, but also more conversations around custom variable fonts.

INT: What design decisions do you have to make when creating a variable font?

As with static fonts, no two variable font projects are the same, so we start by defining the requirements. We consider the purpose, expression, accessibility, functionality, languages, and more. From there, we can confidently define a creative brief. With a variable font, this includes the style and characteristics, but also the design space and axes parameters (weight, width, optical size, italic, or slant).

If a brief is fairly simple, for example a display typeface that flexes to fit packaging sizes, we would consider the width axis. This would allow the typeface to stretch from its narrowest to its widest width, and any width in between. With other briefs, another axis might be more appropriate. For example, if designing a single variable font to support both display and text sizes on the web, the optical size axis (which adjusts proportions, contrast, stroke weight, etc.) would be used.

When designing a variable font family from the outset, the process is much simpler as you start with a single origin outline. It also provides a lot more opportunity, as you can design the font to make the most of the technology that’s available.

We made Aktiv Grotesk variable because it’s pragmatic and rational with just a hint of warmth, a combination that’s hard to find in grotesque typefaces. We wanted to enhance its practicality with a variable font, allowing designers to make the most of the font family’s huge range of weights, styles, and scripts in an economical way. On the web, for example, more weights and styles can be used in combination without impacting page load-times. This is because the variable font format intelligently compresses the information needed to define a whole family into a single file, much smaller than the sum of the individual fonts.

As our largest font family in terms of script support, Aktiv Grotesk (which you can try for free here) will be our first variable font supporting several world scripts. Initially, Aktiv Grotesk VF will support the Latin script, but we will soon be releasing a design update of the Arabic as a variable font with Thai, Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew scripts following throughout 2020.