Have you heard the story of the scor­pion and the frog? It goes like this: a scor­pion wants to cross a river. But he can’t swim. So he asks a nearby frog to carry him across. The frog says, “how do I know you won’t sting me?” The scor­pion replies, “Don’t be silly. We’d both drown.”

Mol­li­fied, the frog in­vites the scor­pion onto his back. Halfway across the river, the scor­pion stings him. As the venom par­a­lyzes the frog, he says, “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both drown.”

With that, the scor­pion un­furls a set of high-tech mo­tor­ized wings and flies to the other side of the river. With his dy­ing breath, the frog says, “So you’re a rich scor­pion? Why did you need me at all?” The scor­pion says, “I may be a rich scor­pion—but I’m still a scorpion.”

If the end­ing sur­prises you, maybe you should spend more time on the com­mit­tees that make tech­nol­ogy standards.

Last week, an up­date to the 20-year-old Open­Type font stan­dard was an­nounced, of­fi­cially called Open­Type Font Vari­a­tions but more com­monly known as vari­able fonts. It’s be­ing dri­ven by the usual sus­pects—Google, Ap­ple, Mi­crosoft, and Adobe. Also par­tic­i­pat­ing are an as­sort­ment of in­de­pen­dent tool de­vel­op­ers, and—al­ways val­ued for their swim­ming skills—in­di­vid­ual type designers.

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.

Be­low, I’ll ex­plain my rea­son­ing. But agree or dis­agree, I hope other type de­sign­ers will give this pro­posed stan­dard the crit­i­cal scrutiny and re­flec­tion it de­serves. Be­cause if we end up at the bot­tom of the river, we won’t be able to say we didn’t know who was rid­ing on our back.

OT Font Vari­a­tions is an up­date to the Open­Type font for­mat that will al­low font files to con­tain mul­ti­ple sets of out­lines. To­day, a sin­gle font file can only con­tain one set of out­lines. So a font fam­ily with, say, weight and width vari­ants has to be ren­dered into a ma­trix of in­di­vid­ual fonts:

Di­a­gram of the Greta font fam­ily by Pe­ter Biľak

But un­der the new stan­dard, the width and weight vari­a­tions can be pack­aged into a sin­gle font file.

Fur­ther­more, cus­tomers will be able to in­ter­po­late be­tween styles. So rather than, say, a set of dis­crete weight options:

Weight be­comes con­tin­u­ously vari­able, and a cus­tomer can choose any­thing in between:

This idea is not new. In the early ’90s, Ap­ple and Adobe launched com­pet­ing font-in­ter­po­la­tion sys­tems. Ap­ple’s was called True­Type GX; Adobe’s was called Mul­ti­ple Mas­ter fonts. Ap­ple’s had the ad­van­tage of be­ing built into the Mac OS. Adobe’s had the ad­van­tage of be­ing sup­ported by Post­Script and PDF.

In fact, dur­ing 1993, I was one of sev­eral type de­sign­ers who worked with Matthew Carter on Skia, a font with weight and width vari­ants that Ap­ple com­mis­sioned to show off True­Type GX. In true time-is-a-flat-cir­cle fash­ion, Skia has a star­ring role in Mi­crosoft’s new OT Font Vari­a­tions white pa­per. (Pearl Jam, un­for­tu­nately, was not avail­able as an open­ing act.)

“So why haven’t we been us­ing this amaz­ing tech­nol­ogy for the last 20 years?” Be­cause it was a New­ton-es­que flop. Be­yond the Ap­ple–Adobe taffy pull, pro­fes­sional print­ers didn’t want to deal with more font headaches (in the ’90s, they al­ready had plenty). And cus­tomers were de­lighted to have any kind of se­lec­tion of dig­i­tal fonts—the in­cre­men­tal value of in­ter­po­lated styles was small. Thus, com­pa­nies that made page-lay­out pro­grams didn’t want to sup­port GX or MM ei­ther. Ul­ti­mately, too much cost and not enough benefit.

The les­son: if the cus­tomer doesn’t ben­e­fit, no one can.

The stag­na­tion of dig­i­tal-font for­mats is one of the most net­tle­some as­pects of type de­sign. Open­Type has now been with us for nearly 20 years (its par­ent, True­Type, has been around for 25). One of the dis­tin­guish­ing fea­tures of OT Font Vari­a­tions is that it’s not mean­ing­fully back­ward com­pat­i­ble with Open­Type. Es­sen­tially, it’s a new for­mat that pro­poses to even­tu­ally sup­plant to­day’s Open­Type font families.

(By the way, when I say the new fonts are not “back­ward com­pat­i­ble”, I mean that they won’t work with op­er­at­ing sys­tems and pro­grams that cur­rently sup­port Open­Type. I don’t mean that the new stan­dard will break ex­ist­ing Open­Type fonts.)

In one sense, it’s in­ter­est­ing to think that the fonts I ship to cus­tomers to­day could be in­stalled and used equally well on a Win­dows 95 ma­chine. But in most senses, it’s point­less. Be­cause in prac­tice, my fonts will never be used on com­put­ers from that era.

The con­verse is not true, how­ever. Fonts made 20 or more years ago are still us­able on to­day’s ma­chines. In fact, they make up the bulk of the Mono­type and Adobe font li­braries. Many re­main on to­day’s best­seller lists. So in fonts, un­like other cat­e­gories of soft­ware, type de­sign­ers have a pe­cu­liar prob­lem: our new work has to com­pete against decades of ac­cu­mu­lated competitors.

Is that a good thing? In terms of turn­ing over in­ven­tory, no. All tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies de­pend on a cer­tain level of ob­so­les­cence. It cre­ates re­cur­ring rev­enue, of course. But it also helps avoid the es­ca­lat­ing costs and con­straints of back­ward compatibility.

More­over, this is a new sit­u­a­tion for type. Long ago, when type was made of wood and metal, it would nat­u­rally wear out with use, and need to be re­placed. In the 20th cen­tury, ad­vance­ments in type­set­ting tech­nol­ogy meant that font li­braries would have to be tossed out and re­placed with new for­mats. So ob­so­les­cence was al­ways in the mix. These days, dig­i­tal fonts seem end­lessly durable.

Still, these his­tor­i­cal com­par­isons are strained. Now 30 years old, dig­i­tal type­found­ing seems ma­ture rel­a­tive to other dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. But rel­a­tive to other type­found­ing tech­nol­ogy, it’s just a blip. For most of type­set­ting his­tory, be­ing a type­founder meant spend­ing your ca­reer near molten metal and car­cino­gens, not an Aeron chair and Keurig cof­fee pods.

Fur­ther­more, though in the past I’ve com­plained about the per­sis­tence of dig­i­tal fonts, it veers to­ward one of my least fa­vorite ar­gu­ments: the idea that a cre­ative per­son has a right to make a liv­ing from their work. Sorry, but no one does. The mar­ket—though ar­ti­fi­cial and im­per­fect—sets the rules. Other fonts ex­ist. Hun­dreds of thou­sands, in fact. As type de­sign­ers, we can ei­ther deal with that fact, or find some­thing else to do with our time.

To be fair, for­mat stag­na­tion isn’t all bad. As a re­sult of run­ning my own type foundry since 2011, I’ve learned first­hand that no mat­ter how much cus­tomers love fonts, they’re look­ing for a low-main­te­nance re­la­tion­ship. Pos­si­bly com­pli­cat­ing this re­la­tion­ship is the fact that fonts are called upon to per­form in a count­less com­bi­na­tions of op­er­at­ing sys­tems, type­set­ting pro­grams, and out­put de­vices. But in prac­tice, fonts just work. This is mirac­u­lous. As an in­de­pen­dent type de­signer, if I had to trou­bleshoot every setup sep­a­rately, I couldn’t stay in busi­ness. As it stands, I get al­most zero sup­port requests.

Why is this pos­si­ble? Be­cause font for­mats have been so sta­ble for so long. I have to imag­ine the cal­cu­lus is sim­i­lar for other in­de­pen­dent type de­sign­ers. So yes, for­mat stag­na­tion is bad for busi­ness in the sense of putting a ceil­ing on what we can ac­com­plish. But it’s ar­guably a nec­es­sary in­gre­di­ent for independence.

Com­ing full cir­cle, though it’s tempt­ing to fid­dle with the mile-high Jenga tower that com­prises to­day’s font-tech­nol­ogy stack, there are risks as well. Not of the “who moved my cheese” va­ri­ety, but rather of cus­tomers get­ting an­noyed with new­fan­gled fonts that over­promise and un­der­de­liver. As we’ve dis­cov­ered, when cus­tomers get frus­trated with fonts, they blame type de­sign­ers. Or they blame cor­po­ra­tions, who in turn blame type de­sign­ers. See the pat­tern? (The most com­mon re­sponse to my few re­quests for tech­ni­cal sup­port is “That prob­lem isn’t be­ing caused by my fonts, but I wish it were, be­cause then I could fix it for you.”)

The les­son: Be care­ful what you wish for.

Though nei­ther True­Type GX nor Mul­ti­ple Mas­ter fonts caught on, Adobe and Mi­crosoft col­lab­o­rated on the Open­Type spec­i­fi­ca­tion in the mid-’90s. (Ap­ple joined in later.) The im­pe­tus for this change was not aes­thetic, but prac­ti­cal: in or­der to sup­port the more com­plex writ­ten lan­guages that are com­mon out­side the US and Eu­rope, fonts and lay­out sys­tems needed to be more so­phis­ti­cated. And with­out sup­port for those lan­guages, no­body could sell their prod­ucts in those parts of the world.

Need­less to say, with huge eco­nomic in­cen­tives on the ta­ble, the new for­mat took off. Well, sort of: the parts of Open­Type that sup­ported new lan­guage sys­tems took off quickly. What didn’t were the parts, like Open­Type fea­tures, that im­proved ty­pog­ra­phy in cur­rent lan­guage systems.

For in­stance, though the Open­Type spec­i­fi­ca­tion was re­leased in 1996, Mi­crosoft Word didn’t sup­port Open­Type fea­tures un­til 2010. Ex­cel and Power­Point still don’t. Ap­ple stopped sup­port­ing Open­Type fea­tures in Pages for sev­eral years, in def­er­ence to its iOS ver­sion. And to­day’s crop of web browsers sup­port these fea­tures with dif­fer­ent lev­els of competence.

The les­son: when cus­tomers and cor­po­ra­tions def­i­nitely ben­e­fit (e.g., Open­Type lan­guage sup­port), de­sign­ers can too. When cus­tomers and de­sign­ers might ben­e­fit (e.g., Open­Type ty­pog­ra­phy fea­tures), cor­po­ra­tions are unreliable.

The last col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the scor­pi­ons and the frogs was WOFF (= Web-Only File For­mat). In 2009, the near-to­tal ab­sence of fonts on the web had be­come a source of frus­tra­tion for web de­sign­ers, who blamed type de­sign­ers for em­bar­go­ing the global font sup­ply, like some schem­ing Bond vil­lain (Dr. No Kern­ing? Glyphfinger?)

Some type de­sign­ers, wisely sens­ing an op­por­tu­nity for a diplo­matic res­o­lu­tion, pro­posed what be­came WOFF—a for­mat de­rived from Open­Type that would put fonts into browsers quickly while pro­tect­ing type-de­signer in­ter­ests (mostly, by mak­ing it harder to copy and use web­fonts on the desk­top). Browser mak­ers got in­volved. The W3C got in­volved. Soon, WOFF was off to the races. That was the good news.

The bad news? Once the dust set­tled, a type de­signer who was in­volved in the ef­fort wrote me that “the foundries who or­ga­nized be­hind this ef­fort didn’t get A SIN­GLE THING that they wanted”. (Em­pha­sis in orig­i­nal.) In other words, in terms of is­sues that mat­tered to de­sign­ers, WOFF was a waste of time—even though it was a de­signer-ger­mi­nated proposal.

I wasn’t in­volved in WOFF. But it’s no crit­i­cism of those who were to ob­serve that this kind of out­come has never been un­usual at the W3C, or within any stan­dards process. Those who can pay to pro­tect their in­ter­ests of­ten do. Those who can’t, don’t.

More­over, one of the by-de­sign side ef­fects of a stan­dards process is to achieve po­lit­i­cal peace with pos­si­ble fu­ture op­po­nents. When you pro­vide op­po­nents an op­por­tu­nity to be heard, they’re per­ma­nently dis­armed. How can any­one com­plain about the re­sult of a process that they par­tic­i­pated in?

The les­son: when cus­tomers and cor­po­ra­tions ben­e­fit, de­sign­ers should think twice about stand­ing in the way, be­cause our ne­go­ti­at­ing lever­age is limited.

WOFF2 is an up­date to WOFF that was first pro­posed in May 2014. Un­like WOFF Clas­sic, WOFF2 was not a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween type de­sign­ers and browser mak­ers. It was just some­thing Mono­type and Google wanted. And, since they’re both pay­ing mem­bers of the W3C, they got it.

Why did they want it? The only sig­nif­i­cant change in WOFF2 was that it added a new com­pres­sion scheme that can make font files smaller. Why did Google and Mono­type want smaller files? Be­cause they’re two of the three biggest providers of hosted web­fonts. (The other is Adobe, who sup­ported it quickly.) Cut your file sizes = cut your host­ing bills. Sim­ple. For cus­tomers and de­sign­ers, it was met with a shrug, since WOFF2 didn’t change any­thing in­side the font.

The les­son: when cor­po­ra­tions ben­e­fit, and cus­tomers and de­sign­ers are un­af­fected, they get what they want.

“But cus­tomers ben­e­fit from smaller file sizes too, be­cause that makes web pages faster.” Cer­tainly, that was true in 1996. And some web de­vel­op­ers per­sist with po­lit­i­cal ob­jec­tions. But with to­day’s faster con­nec­tions—even on mo­bile—op­ti­miz­ing for file size is less use­ful than ever.

Net­work la­tency—that is, the num­ber of re­quests a web page makes to var­i­ous servers mul­ti­plied by how long each takes to es­tab­lish—is the real buga­boo. In 1996, a web page might have made a few re­quests to down­load im­ages. These days, thanks to the noth­ing-but-ad­ver­tis­ing econ­omy of the web, a page might make “hun­dreds or even thou­sands of re­quests to fully load all of the ad­ver­tise­ments and an­a­lyt­ics”, ac­cord­ing to one study by Forbes.

To­gether, stream­ing-video ser­vices con­sume 75% of the in­ter­net’s band­width. Their sup­port for net neu­tral­ity is mostly about not want­ing to pay for what they use.

For Google in par­tic­u­lar, we should shed a gi­ant croc­o­dile tear when­ever it con­cern-trolls us about file sizes on the web. You­Tube (owned by Google) con­sumes an as­ton­ish­ing 18% of all in­ter­net band­width, sec­ond only to Net­flix (an eye-wa­ter­ing 37%). The file sizes of fonts—geez, that seems low on the list of the in­ter­net’s band­width problems.

FWIW, since 2013, Prac­ti­cal Ty­pog­ra­phy has been an on­go­ing ex­per­i­ment in ex­treme web­fonting. I’ve pushed about a megabyte of fonts to mil­lions of read­ers, who are us­ing all kinds of web browsers and plat­forms (in­clud­ing mo­bile). To­tal com­plaints I’ve re­ceived about page per­for­mance: zero. Of course, I don’t have ads or track­ers ei­ther. So it’s a ques­tion of priorities.

For rea­sons un­clear, this claim about net­work la­tency has al­ways pro­voked howls of out­rage among the web-dev Twit­terati. Folks, let’s work from ev­i­dence, not su­per­sti­tion. For ex­am­ple, here’s a quick test I did in Sep­tem­ber 2016, with home pages ranked in or­der of load time. As you can see, load time cor­re­lates more strongly with num­ber of re­quests than down­load size. And Prac­ti­cal Ty­pog­ra­phy beats every­one but the world’s biggest cor­po­ra­tion. Since I only pay $6 a month for host­ing, I can live with that:

website bytes requests load time apple.com 1.9 MB 47 0.62s practicaltypography.com 1.8 MB 10 1.21s medium.com 1.4 MB 55 1.37s alistapart.com 0.54 MB 45 1.44s stackoverflow.com 0.36 MB 43 1.60s microsoft.com 1.8 MB 119 1.87s youtube.com 2.1 MB 165 2.39s yahoo.com 2.6 MB 117 2.56s amazon.com 3.9 MB 128 2.58s adobe.com 2.0 MB 218 2.65s nytimes.com 5.4 MB 501 5.20s

“The nice thing about stan­dards is that you have so many to choose from.”

—An­drew S. Tanenbaum

The ba­sic im­prove­ment of­fered by vari­able fonts—in­ter­po­lated styles—has al­ready failed twice in the mar­ket. What’s the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to try it all again?

With com­mend­able can­dor, type de­signer John Hud­son, who worked on OT Font Vari­a­tions, has tried to ad­dress this ques­tion. (John is a friend & a ter­rific type de­signer, so I’m go­ing to break with pro­to­col and not re­fer to him as “Mr. Hudson.”)

This time, the cor­po­ra­tions at the ta­ble—Ap­ple, Adobe, Google, Mi­crosoft—have “de­signed [the new stan­dard] col­lab­o­ra­tively” rather than push­ing mul­ti­ple stan­dards. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that un­like pre­vi­ous evo­lu­tions of the True­Type/Open­Type lin­eage, OT Font Vari­a­tions re­quires “sub­stan­tial up­dates” to op­er­at­ing sys­tems and ap­pli­ca­tions, and has “very lim­ited back­wards com­pat­i­bil­ity”. When we see those words, we should con­clude that things are about to get very ex­pen­sive for type de­sign­ers, and very bro­ken for customers.

But some­times this is the price of progress. What will be the ben­e­fit of all this up­heaval? Ac­cord­ing to John, “a big part of the an­swer is web­fonts, and the need for more com­pact and faster ways to de­liver dy­namic fonts for the Web”.

That sounds like WOFF2. Sure, cor­po­ra­tions that serve a lot of fonts over the net­work will al­ways want to make them smaller, thereby sav­ing money. But as we saw above, that’s not likely to ben­e­fit type de­sign­ers or customers.

Us­ing vari­able fonts would re­duce the num­ber of server re­quests too, but we can al­ready do that—for in­stance, by en­cod­ing fonts into CSS files with Base64.

The file-size sav­ings may be over­stated any­how. For in­stance, a Mi­crosoft man­ager gave the ex­am­ple that a “a con­ven­tional five-weight font fam­ily” that uses 656 KB as in­di­vid­ual fonts might only weigh 199 KB when repack­aged as a vari­able font. But have you ever seen a web­site that uses five weights of a sin­gle font? Not me. Two weights, how­ever, are very com­mon, and in that case, it’s not yet clear that the new for­mat con­fers any advantage.

What else? The new fonts “ have the po­ten­tial to en­able new kinds of ty­pog­ra­phy for elec­tronic doc­u­ments, re­spon­sive to things like de­vice ori­en­ta­tion or even view­ing distance”.

That sounds like True­Type GX or Mul­ti­ple Mas­ter fonts, which went nowhere with cus­tomers, or Open­Type ty­po­graphic fea­tures, which went nowhere with cor­po­ra­tions who had to build sup­port for them. First, since we’re be­ing can­did, most pro­fes­sional graphic and web de­sign­ers don’t care much about fonts at all. (For in­stance: Ox­ford Uni­ver­sity Press, one of the most re­spected book pub­lish­ers, nev­er­the­less sets nearly all its books in Min­ion, a font that every Adobe cus­tomer has got­ten for free for 20 years.) Sec­ond, those that do care about fonts are look­ing for a low-main­te­nance re­la­tion­ship, not a lab-mon­key ex­pe­ri­ence. Third, think of the strug­gles that it took to bring fonts to the web at all. Hav­ing just reached the point where web­fonts have been ac­cepted within the main­stream web, what’s the virtue of break­ing every­thing again? “Po­ten­tial” is not quite enough.

What’s more, font li­cens­ing as a busi­ness can only be as healthy as the in­dus­try it serves. In this case, if vari­able fonts are largely be­ing pitched as an im­prove­ment for the web, we ought to ask: how much money is there is in web pub­lish­ing? The an­swer: not damn much. (My font-rev­enue re­ports for the first six years of the web­font era back that up.) To my mind, that’s an­other big dif­fer­ence from Open­Type in the mid-’90s, which was in­tro­duced into what was still a healthy print-pub­lish­ing in­dus­try. (My font-rev­enue re­ports back that up too.) As an in­de­pen­dent de­signer, I can’t do much with tech­no­log­i­cal po­ten­tial un­less it also im­plies rev­enue potential.

What else? Vari­able fonts “ pro­vide sig­nif­i­cant ad­van­tages for em­bed­ding fonts in de­vices, es­pe­cially for East Asian (CJK) and other fonts with very large glyph sets and char­ac­ter coverage”.

That sounds like the lan­guage-sup­port as­pects of Open­Type. If broad­en­ing the mar­ket for tech­nol­ogy prod­ucts is the best ar­gu­ment for re­vis­ing font stan­dards, then this will likely end up be­ing the best ra­tio­nale for vari­able fonts. But for type de­sign­ers who work with West­ern scripts—which de­scribes the ma­jor­ity of pro­fes­sional type de­sign­ers, me in­cluded—it doesn’t move the nee­dle. The orig­i­nal Open­Type spec let us ex­pand our reach into other West­ern-script mar­kets (e.g., Es­peranto and Mal­tese), be­cause those lan­guages were ba­si­cally sim­i­lar to lan­guages we al­ready sup­ported (e.g., Eng­lish and French). But fonts for East Asian lan­guages are a com­pletely dif­fer­ent ket­tle of fish.

In say­ing that, I take noth­ing away from the type de­sign­ers who make East Asian fonts. For them, vari­able fonts might be huge. Won­der­ful—may they profit greatly. In time, the West­ern cor­ner of the type mar­ket might even look com­par­a­tively small. Won­der­ful—I will be do­ing some­thing else by then.

Be­fore we had web­fonts, it was ap­par­ent that cus­tomers were ea­ger for them, judg­ing by the num­ber of hacks that arose to ap­prox­i­mate them, and the num­ber of com­plaints about their ab­sence. There has been no sim­i­lar ac­tiv­ity in the ab­sence of vari­able fonts.

As a de­signer, I’m sure vari­able fonts would be en­ter­tain­ing to work with. But from what I can see, there’s no ev­i­dence that my cus­tomers are in­ter­ested in that ca­pa­bil­ity—let alone pre­pared to open their wal­lets for it. There­fore, the ben­e­fits don’t out­weigh the sig­nif­i­cant cost of los­ing back­ward com­pat­i­bil­ity (mean­ing, pack­ag­ing font fam­i­lies into a new for­mat that’s not sup­ported by any plat­forms or ap­pli­ca­tions cur­rently in use).

On the con­trary, based on his­tor­i­cal pat­terns, it’s easy to imag­ine a sce­nario where I spend a lot of time de­vel­op­ing vari­able fonts that ba­si­cally no­body wants, and the few who do buy them dis­cover that they rarely work as ad­ver­tised. If this seems sullen or hard-hearted, no—type de­sign­ers have to make these choices all the time. I of­ten get asked to sup­port new char­ac­ter sets—Greek, Russ­ian, Viet­namese, math & sci­ence, and so on. These would all be fan­tas­tic projects. But I can’t reach enough pay­ing cus­tomers to make any of them worth­while. If type de­sign were my hobby, I’d be de­lighted to pur­sue these projects. But since it’s my work, I have to pass.

John also sum­ma­rizes how far the cor­po­rate par­tic­i­pants have pro­gressed with vari­able fonts. With this, we can make some ed­u­cated guesses about what they’re get­ting out of it:

The “Win­dows en­gi­neer­ing team at Mi­crosoft” is plan­ning to add sup­port for vari­able fonts in 2017. That sounds great, un­less you know any­thing about the cul­ture at Mi­crosoft, where every di­vi­sion sets their own de­vel­op­ment agenda, and they ba­si­cally all hate each other. Of­fice is in a sep­a­rate di­vi­sion from Win­dows, which is why Open­Type sup­port in Of­fice has lagged far be­hind OT sup­port in Win­dows: if a fea­ture doesn’t sell more copies of Of­fice, they’re not much in­ter­ested in im­ple­ment­ing it. Un­like Of­fice, the Edge web browser is part of the Win­dows di­vi­sion, so it’s likely to sup­port vari­able fonts sooner. John notes that the browser team is also work­ing on a “for­mal pro­posal for sup­port of vari­able fonts in Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets (CSS) for the Web”. Again, that sounds great, un­less you know any­thing about the cul­ture at Mi­crosoft. They’ve al­ways been ea­ger to make web stan­dards, and never been ea­ger to sup­port them. I pre­dict: Don’t bet against his­tory. Re­gard­less of Mi­crosoft’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in vari­able fonts, Of­fice may not mean­ing­fully sup­port it for decades; Edge may not mean­ing­fully sup­port the web-stan­dard ver­sion of it ever. Ap­ple “ char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally, [is] least forth­com­ing about fu­ture plans, but they have a head start on vari­able font sup­port in their True­Type GX in­fra­struc­ture”. GX dates from 1993, so I’m skep­ti­cal how much of a tech­ni­cal “head start” Ap­ple really has, when every­thing else in the Ap­ple ecosys­tem is com­pletely dif­fer­ent. (That was also the last time Ap­ple took any kind of lead­ing role in font tech­nol­ogy.) Ap­ple’s busi­ness has also com­pletely changed since 1993. Then, they were pri­mar­ily a desk­top-com­puter com­pany; now, they’re pri­mar­ily a mo­bile-phone com­pany. Their sup­port for vari­able fonts likely re­duces to the ques­tion of whether it will help them sell more i­Phones in China and else­where in Asia. I pre­dict: Ap­ple will fol­low their orig­i­nal Open­Type strat­egy—let every­one else go first, and im­ple­ment the stan­dard only if it proves to be valu­able in the mo­bile-phone market. Adobe’s font-tech­nol­ogy team is up­dat­ing its tools for font de­vel­op­ers, but there are “no de­tails about sup­port for vari­able fonts in Adobe’s ap­pli­ca­tion suite”. As with Mi­crosoft, Adobe’s ap­pli­ca­tion group is a dif­fer­ent di­vi­sion with dif­fer­ent pri­or­i­ties. I don’t think they hate each other as much. But Cre­ative Suite Cloud is Adobe’s cash cow. They’re not go­ing to let vari­able fonts mess with those teats. Adobe also care­fully pro­tects its re­la­tion­ships with big pub­lish­ers and print­ers. They’re not go­ing to let vari­able fonts foul them up (es­pe­cially af­ter re­cent mis­fires like Adobe Dig­i­tal Edi­tions). I pre­dict: Adobe will ex­ert min­i­mal ef­fort to sup­port vari­able fonts for West­ern lan­guages. Though con­sis­tent with ’90s nos­tal­gia, they will re­lease ver­sions of Myr­iad and Min­ion in the new for­mat (and they bet­ter bring Pearl Jam to Adobe MAX this year). Oth­er­wise, they’ll re­serve most of their ef­fort for sup­port­ing vari­able fonts in East Asian fonts. Fi­nally, Google has ap­par­ently been work­ing on vari­able-font tech­nol­ogy for two years, get­ting it ready for “Google Chrome [and] the Google Fonts web­font plat­form”. That’s no sur­prise. First, we know Google saves money with small files. Sec­ond, Google Fonts shifted its fo­cus to East Asian scripts a while ago, hav­ing con­quered the west. Third, be­cause Google spends more freely than Adobe or Mi­crosoft, and they’ve al­ready amassed an army of un­der­paid type de­sign­ers, these de­sign­ers will prob­a­bly be de­ployed to con­vert many ex­ist­ing Google fonts to the new for­mat. These fonts will be just as ter­ri­ble as the orig­i­nals. But since Google has no cus­tomers in pro­fes­sional pub­lish­ing, and no taste, every­thing will still be awesome. I pre­dict: Google will con­tinue to be the most vig­or­ous early adopter of vari­able fonts, but the ben­e­fits will be re­stricted to the Googleverse.

I could’ve dis­cussed prob­lems with spe­cific tech­ni­cal as­pects of vari­able fonts (e.g., if this for­mat won’t be back­ward com­pat­i­ble, why stick with a bi­nary-ta­ble struc­ture held over from the ’80s? Or why is in­ter­po­la­tion the only kind of trans­for­ma­tion supported?)

But there’s no point. Mar­ket con­sid­er­a­tions will al­ways over­ride tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. Thus, to fore­cast what will hap­pen with vari­able fonts, it’s far more im­por­tant to con­sider the mar­ket in­ter­ests of the stake­hold­ers, rather than the par­tic­u­lars of the for­mat. The how is less im­por­tant than the what and why.

As John says in his ar­ti­cle, “font mak­ers ... have a long col­lec­tive mem­ory” about these things. (True.) The down­side is that it ex­tends this kind of ar­ti­cle to epic length. (Sorry.) The up­side is that if you want to know what hap­pens in these sit­u­a­tions, there’s a decades-long trail of bread­crumbs for you to study. I’m sure this kind of home­work will seem crusty and te­dious to those who en­tered type de­sign more re­cently than I did. (Sorry about that too.)

But look across this his­tory, and a sim­ple prin­ci­ple emerges. It’s a cliché, but as usual, the cus­tomer is al­ways right. When type de­sign­ers have ac­cepted what cus­tomers want (e.g., bet­ter Open­Type lan­guage sup­port) the mar­ket has re­warded us. When type de­sign­ers have re­sisted what cus­tomers want (e.g., easy ac­cess to web­fonts) the mar­ket has pun­ished us.

Why does this prin­ci­ple work? First, be­cause cus­tomers pay us—duh. Sec­ond, be­cause the cor­po­rate par­tic­i­pants in the type mar­ket have to serve those same cus­tomers. Ul­ti­mately, they can’t af­ford to alien­ate cus­tomers any more than we can. So where the cus­tomers lead, every­one follows.

The corol­lary to this prin­ci­ple is that when cus­tomer de­mand is re­moved from the pic­ture, things get murky. In this case, we might ask: if the vari­able-fonts stan­dard has been built out­side the prac­ti­cal in­flu­ence of cus­tomer de­mand, then who does it serve?

The ide­al­ist might say that a stan­dard pro­vides a level play­ing field for mar­ket par­tic­i­pants. But in prac­tice, stan­dards tend to re­flect the in­ter­ests of who­ever has the most weight to throw around.

The ide­al­ist might also say that new stan­dards are nec­es­sary for tech­no­log­i­cal progress. But in the mar­ket, the costs of progress end up be­ing strictly weighed against the benefits.

Ul­ti­mately, I see no ev­i­dence that vari­able fonts are some­thing my cus­tomers want. But I see plenty of ev­i­dence that it will help Ap­ple, Google, et al. sell more prod­ucts in cer­tain coun­tries, or save money on band­width. I’m sure these cor­po­ra­tions would love more help from type de­sign­ers to make their tech­nol­ogy look good. And if you want to go for a swim, don’t let me stop you. But this frog is go­ing to stay right here on the side of the river, where it’s sunny and dry.

—Matthew But­t­er­ick

20 Sept 2016

Mi­crosoft: The newest Win­dows 10 up­date con­tains an “ini­tial im­ple­men­ta­tion” of vari­able fonts. (Trans­la­tion: buggy and in­com­plete.) But: no sup­port yet in Of­fice or the Edge web browser. This, even though Mi­crosoft claimed last year that it would “sup­port vari­able fonts on all its prod­ucts” by the end of 2017. Mi­crosoft did man­age to ship its first vari­able font, Bahn­schrift. Over­all: about what I expected.

Ap­ple: Since Sep­tem­ber 2016, a hand­ful of spe­cial-pur­pose Ap­ple sys­tem fonts have re­lied on vari­able fonts. As of last month, the Sa­fari web browser sup­ports vari­able fonts (on both iOS and Mac OS). But: still no sup­port for vari­able fonts in desk­top type­set­ting ap­pli­ca­tions (like Pages). Nor any show­case vari­able fonts in the OS. Over­all: Ap­ple is drag­ging its feet less than I ex­pected. But they’re not at the front of the pack either.

Adobe: Af­ter I pub­lished the orig­i­nal ver­sion of this piece, an Adobe em­ployee told me that “for us it really is all about the vari­a­tion, not the file size sav­ings ... I ex­pect you’ll be pleas­antly sur­prised by sup­port in Adobe apps”. A year later, some progress has emerged. Vari­able fonts are sup­ported in the newest ver­sions of Pho­to­shop and Il­lus­tra­tor. But: so far, that sup­port is buggy and in­com­plete. And no sup­port at all in Adobe’s flag­ship page-lay­out pro­gram, In­De­sign, used by a huge num­ber of pro­fes­sional de­sign­ers. Per­haps most strangely, Adobe hasn’t re­leased any show­case vari­able fonts, save for some “Con­cept” fonts (trans­la­tion: buggy and in­com­plete). And none of those are East Asian fonts. Over­all: even lazier than I predicted.

Google: Sup­port for vari­able fonts will be in­cluded in the Chrome 62 browser, which will start per­co­lat­ing out to users this month. Google also funded the de­vel­op­ment of two free vari­able fonts (#1, #2) that are, um, in­ter­est­ing tech­ni­cal demos but not ex­actly prac­ti­cal. But: Google has not made any vis­i­ble push to con­vert fonts in its ex­ist­ing li­brary to use vari­a­tions tech­nol­ogy. Over­all: I pre­dicted Google would be out in front. But they’ve put in less ef­fort than I ex­pected. Sorry to be the party pooper.

Taken to­gether, a mediocre ef­fort. So far, vari­able fonts 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. Chrome and Sa­fari are the most pop­u­lar web browsers (the oth­ers are lin­ger­ing in the sin­gle dig­its). Given that it took about 15 years to get web­fonts in browsers to be­gin with, that seems like rel­a­tively en­cour­ag­ing mo­men­tum. Still, even in the best case, it takes months for newer browser ver­sions to dis­place the old.

But the dark­est sign is the lack of use­ful fonts built with vari­able fonts tech­nol­ogy. Google and Adobe have made some demo fonts. But no­body is ship­ping or show­ing off solid, us­able vari­able fonts. In fact, one vari­able-font demo site is so starved for demo fonts that it in­cludes fonts orig­i­nally made nearly 25 years ago to show off Ap­ple’s True­Type GX tech­nol­ogy (con­verted to the new format).

I’ve heard this called a chicken-and-egg prob­lem: type de­sign­ers don’t have any in­cen­tive to make vari­able fonts un­til ap­pli­ca­tion sup­port is more wide­spread. Mean­while, ap­pli­ca­tion pro­gram­mers don’t have any in­cen­tive to up­date their pro­grams un­til there’s more fonts.

But this over­looks a key fact: this isn’t some grass­roots cam­paign. The tech­nol­ogy sup­port­ing vari­able fonts is sup­pos­edly backed by four of the biggest tech com­pa­nies in the world. They have the money and staff to cap­i­tal­ize the ef­fort. If they want to.

Do they? The mid­dling progress dur­ing the first year of vari­able fonts leaves me even more con­fused about how these com­pa­nies plan to ben­e­fit. I orig­i­nally fig­ured it had some­thing to do with re­duc­ing the costs of serv­ing web­fonts, es­pe­cially for East Asian scripts. Adding sup­port to web browsers is a nec­es­sary first step. But the lack of ac­tual show­case fonts—and sim­ple demo web­sites us­ing them—is ex­tremely weird.

And demos count. An old mar­ket­ing maxim holds that ef­fec­tive ad­ver­tis­ing doesn’t talk about the shovel—it talks about the hole in the ground. This is why demos are his­tor­i­cally im­por­tant in the tech world: they help il­lus­trate the ben­e­fit of us­ing the tech­nol­ogy, which in turn per­suades cus­tomers that a) it works and b) they want it.

Based on their weak out­put in year one, Mi­crosoft, Ap­ple, Adobe, and Google still seem un­able to ar­tic­u­late what cus­tomer prob­lems will be solved by vari­able fonts. If that re­mains true, this tech­nol­ogy will have a short ride to the bot­tom of the river, com­ing to rest near the moss-cov­ered skele­tons of Mul­ti­ple Mas­ters and True­Type GX.

In Oc­to­ber 2017, I wrote that dur­ing the 12 months af­ter OT Vari­able Fonts were an­nounced (in Sept 2016) we hadn’t seen “ag­gres­sive ac­tion” from the four main cor­po­rate spon­sors of vari­able fonts (= Mi­crosoft, Ap­ple, Adobe, and Google). Rather, I de­tected only the “milder scent of bets be­ing hedged”.

The un­der­ly­ing rev­enue model for web pub­lish­ers hasn’t im­proved since last year. But we’ll side­step that wrin­kle for now.

In year two, this al­ready lan­guid pace has slowed to a crawl. Af­ter the first year, the bright­est sign for vari­able fonts was “web-browser sup­port”. Since then, re­mark­ably lit­tle has hap­pened, as mea­sured by shipped prod­ucts. The de­clin­ing for­ward mo­men­tum that once sig­naled “bets be­ing hedged” now looks more like tents be­ing folded:

Mi­crosoft: the Edge browser now sup­ports vari­able fonts. But no sign of sup­port in MS Of­fice. Nor any new show­case fonts.

Ap­ple: no sig­nif­i­cant news that I can de­tect. Still no sup­port for vari­able fonts in desk­top apps like Pages or Num­bers. No new show­case vari­able fonts in the OS.

Adobe: no news since last Oc­to­ber. In par­tic­u­lar, still no sup­port for vari­able fonts in In­De­sign, Adobe’s flag­ship type­set­ting pack­age. Adobe has con­tin­ued to plod along with its ex­per­i­men­tal vari­able fonts, though one of the “cur­rent lim­i­ta­tions” is that the OTF ver­sions “can­not be dis­played by ma­cOS or Windows”.

Google: AFAICT the num­ber of vari­able fonts re­leased this past year via Google Fonts is zero. No sup­port in Google apps (Docs, Slides) ei­ther. Once again, sorry to be the party pooper.

Though they weren’t part of the core vari­able-fonts con­sor­tium, what about our friends at Mono­type? They re­leased a demo ver­sion of FF Meta Vari­able. And also—nope, that’s it. One demo font.

Mean­while, work on the OT Font Vari­a­tions stan­dard it­self has hit at least one ma­jor snag, re­lated to sup­port for what are known as “vir­tual axes”. With­out delv­ing into the de­tails, even John Hud­son, orig­i­nal evan­ge­list for vari­able fonts, has con­ceded that the is­sue is suf­fi­ciently im­por­tant that “a lot of [work with vari­able fonts] is ef­fec­tively on hold” un­til the prob­lem is re­solved. Not ex­actly the turbo boost that vari­able fonts could’ve used.

If you’re ea­ger to try vari­able fonts, the good news is that the Axis-Praxis vari­able-fonts demo site has con­tin­ued to grow. It’s been joined by the new v-fonts.com. Most of the fonts on these sites have been made by in­de­pen­dent type de­sign­ers, who have done more than any­one else to churn out en­ter­tain­ing demo fonts. I com­pli­ment all of you. A lot of these vari­able fonts are very clever and well made.

And yet. This is only “good news” in a nar­row sense. More broadly, it ful­fills my orig­i­nal pre­dic­tion from two years ago: that the cor­po­rate spon­sors of vari­able fonts (= Mi­crosoft, Ap­ple, Adobe, Google) would min­i­mize their ef­fort. Rather than stick out their own necks, they’d let in­de­pen­dent type de­sign­ers do­nate their time to make vari­able fonts tech­nol­ogy look good.

Last year, my friend S. said “MB, you’re be­ing too harsh. There’s a lot of ac­tiv­ity hap­pen­ing be­hind the scenes.” Per­haps. But what’s hap­pen­ing in front of the cur­tain also counts. No­tably, af­ter two years, cus­tomers aren’t pay­ing for vari­able fonts. The whole no­tion of a vari­able-fonts econ­omy is still the­o­ret­i­cal. This key prob­lem re­mains unaddressed.

Though not un­ex­am­ined. Type de­signer Jo­hannes Neumeier con­sid­ered an in­ter­est­ing thought ex­per­i­ment: if us­able vari­able fonts ac­tu­ally ex­isted, what would they need to cost? He con­cluded—and I agree—that vari­able fonts are “in­com­patib[le] with cur­rent li­cens­ing mod­els”. Cus­tomers won’t want to pay the same for one vari­able font as they would for, say, a large set of dis­crete styles, even if the vari­able font cov­ers the same de­sign space. Though vari­able fonts have been touted as a bold new fu­ture for type de­sign, it’s equally pos­si­ble that they’ll lead to a new down­ward spi­ral of more work for less pay.

Still, to give my critic S. her due: I agree I was too harsh. I doubt this doom-and-gloom sce­nario will come to pass. Why? Be­cause it’s ap­par­ent that even if you have es­sen­tially un­lim­ited time and money—e.g., you are Mi­crosoft, Ap­ple, Adobe, or Google—it’s still painfully dif­fi­cult to make vari­able fonts that work well. As proof, con­sider that other than a hand­ful of spe­cial-pur­pose OS fonts, not one of these cor­po­rate spon­sors has shipped a no-caveats vari­able font. (Mean­ing, some­thing that is com­plete and us­able and not la­beled a “demo” or “con­cept”, etc.) I re­main du­bi­ous that in­de­pen­dent type de­sign­ers should do for huge cor­po­ra­tions what these cor­po­ra­tions won’t (or can’t) do for themselves.

At some point, a well-in­formed source told me that the cor­po­rate spon­sors of vari­able fonts were “ba­si­cally mo­ti­vated by one thing only: smaller font foot­print”. If so, it’s start­ing to look like vari­able fonts are the world’s most la­bor-in­ten­sive—and there­fore least prac­ti­cal—file-com­pres­sion scheme.

Mi­crosoft: No new ap­pli­ca­tions re­leased with sup­port for vari­able fonts since the Edge web browser in 2018. (We’ll leave aside the fact that Edge re­mains even less pop­u­lar than In­ter­net Ex­plorer.) Mi­crosoft Of­fice? Surely you jest. What about new vari­able fonts? Nope.

Adobe: The good news—in No­vem­ber, In­De­sign in­tro­duced sup­port for vari­able fonts. The bad news—early re­ports sug­gest that not all vari­able fonts work equally well, or more omi­nously, that Adobe might be priv­i­leg­ing its new CFF2 font for­mat. As for new vari­able fonts: none that I’ve been able to find.

Ap­ple: No up­dates for the i­Work of­fice suite (Pages / Num­bers / Keynote) with vari­able fonts. Nor has Ap­ple re­leased any new vari­able fonts of its own.

Google: In Oc­to­ber, Google up­dated its font API to sup­port vari­able fonts, in­clud­ing 10 vari­able up­grades of ex­ist­ing Google fonts. Demo here.

Strictly speak­ing, Mi­crosoft didn’t end up build­ing vari­able-font sup­port for Edge. In an un­ex­pected turn, it shifted Edge onto the Chromium browser en­gine, which al­ready sup­ported vari­able fonts.

In gen­eral, my orig­i­nal pre­dic­tions from 2016 are hold­ing up pretty well. Mi­crosoft, Ap­ple, and Adobe are do­ing as lit­tle as pos­si­ble to sup­port vari­able fonts. (Though I was wrong that the Mi­crosoft Edge browser would never sup­port vari­able fonts—it does.) Mean­while, Google has in­deed be­come the “most vig­or­ous early adopter of vari­able fonts, but the ben­e­fits [are] re­stricted to the Google­verse.” The rea­son be­ing that as the world’s biggest server of web­fonts, Google po­ten­tially saves money with vari­able fonts.

Still, 3+ years into the vari­able-font era, it re­mains un­clear how & when the econ­omy of vari­able fonts is sup­posed to emerge. Mean­ing, if type de­sign­ers can’t make vari­able fonts at rea­son­able cost and sell them at a profit to font cus­tomers—who have to get their money’s worth—the vari­able-font mar­ket will re­main an ex­per­i­men­tal niche.

To be fair, these days Adobe is largely a dig­i­tal-mar­ket­ing com­pany. Cre­ative Cloud is a side project, and fonts are a side project of that side project.

Here, we would’ve hoped to see Adobe lead­ing by ex­am­ple, as the lead­ing pur­veyor of tools to the pro-de­sign mar­ket. The sup­port for vari­able fonts in In­De­sign (how­ever spotty) is en­cour­ag­ing. But the to­tal lack of mo­men­tum on the type-de­vel­op­ment side is not. For in­stance, two years af­ter the an­nounce­ment of vari­able-font demos of Acumin, Min­ion, and Myr­iad, no ap­par­ent progress has been made.

This past year, a num­ber of in­de­pen­dent foundries—e.g., Dal­ton Maag and Font­smith—have started sell­ing what may be the first no-ex­cuses vari­able-font fam­i­lies. My com­pli­ments to you. (FWIW, Dal­ton Maag has also done cus­tom font work for Google.)

In his own year-end re­port, vari­able-font op­ti­mist (and some­time Google con­sul­tant) Ja­son Pa­men­tal ac­knowl­edges the on­go­ing “frus­tra­tion about lack of sales” among type de­sign­ers and sug­gests “of­fer­ing [cus­tomers] a deal ... in re­turn for hav­ing a case study.” You mean—if we work for free, it’ll be great ex­po­sure? Where have I heard this be­fore? As I said when I first wrote this piece, there’s lit­tle money be­ing made in web pub­lish­ing. There­fore there’s also lit­tle money be­ing put into web-pub­lish­ing tools, in­clud­ing web­fonts. The idea that vari­able fonts can break even pri­mar­ily as a web for­mat is mag­i­cal thinking.

Still, if type foundries and their cus­tomers don’t adopt vari­able fonts, the for­mat won’t nec­es­sar­ily die. For in­stance, vari­able fonts could mostly be­come known as a fea­ture of Google Fonts, even as the broader pos­si­bil­ity of the for­mat fades away. If vari­able fonts save Google enough money, Google has am­ple in­cen­tive to keep them alive.

I men­tioned Google’s con­nec­tion to Dal­ton Maag and Mr. Pa­men­tal. Over the last 10 years—and es­pe­cially since the an­nounce­ment of vari­able fonts—Google has bought a lot of in­flu­ence in what is the rel­a­tively small world of ty­pog­ra­phy. Much more than Ap­ple, Mi­crosoft, and Adobe have done.

Early on, Google built its free-font li­brary by work­ing with type de­sign­ers who weren’t typ­i­cally in­volved with the pro­fes­sional type world. Since then, Google has learned to spread money around more lib­er­ally. To my mind, this cam­paign has got­ten pro­fes­sional type de­sign­ers and ty­pog­ra­phers to take Google more se­ri­ously. Though per­haps at the cost of be­ing less care­ful about scru­ti­niz­ing Google’s motives.

To be fair, Google has done some pos­i­tive things for ty­pog­ra­phy. As I’ve said be­fore, I think Google’s pro­mo­tion of web­fonts helped spur ac­cep­tance within main­stream web de­sign. They’ve also con­tributed some use­ful open-source soft­ware for mak­ing fonts.

But for Google, fonts are strictly a tool to en­hance their core busi­ness of sur­veil­lance and ad­ver­tis­ing. And the only price Google cares about is free. No one at Google has ever sold a font li­cense, or ever will. So the idea that there could be deeper com­mon cause be­tween Google and pro­fes­sional type de­sign­ers is strained. Maybe like the com­mon cause be­tween dairy farm­ers and cows. Or scor­pi­ons and frogs.

I know that some think this ar­ti­cle is just a mul­ti­year se­ries of pes­simistic put-downs. But truly—I would’ve been happy to see vari­able fonts suc­ceed. As I said in 2016, “I’m sure vari­able fonts would be en­ter­tain­ing to work with.” If cus­tomers would pay for them. If these fonts could be made with rea­son­able time and ef­fort. And maybe there are niches of the type mar­ket where these two con­di­tions will turn out to be true.

Para­met­ric type de­sign is ar­guably the grail—or maybe white whale—of the dig­i­tal-type era. I would’ve been de­lighted to dis­cover that the (very wealthy cor­po­rate) stake­hold­ers in vari­able fonts had, af­ter 40+ years of at­tempts by oth­ers, sorted out these is­sues. By and large, I don’t think they have. In 1977, Don­ald Knuth’s META­FONT sys­tem showed off the ty­po­graphic promise of pa­ra­me­teric type. To­day, it seems the po­ten­tial of this grand idea is be­ing flat­tened into a way of in­creas­ing Google’s prof­its. What an accomplishment.

—Matthew Butterick