

A List Apart: On Variable Fonts TECHNICAL | TYPEFACES



If you're into web typography, unless you've been sleeping under a rock it's highly likely that you've heard about the official announcement for the Variable Fonts for responsive design standard, most likely from John Hudson.



That article gets extremely technical, but in a nutshell, we're about to finally get a font file to rule them all, as explained briefly by Hudson: An OpenType variable font contains one or more axes that each provide particular variation between different extremes of a typeface design. The format also allows for the possibility of intermediate designs, for the whole glyph set or for individual glyphs, to provide finer control over the design as it changes across the variations design space. But what you might have missed is the article from A List Apart, written by Nick Sherman, making the case for the necessity of something of this magnitude in web typography. He very clearly defines and compares static vs. dynamic typefaces and answers the most common concerns that have been around ever since OT 1.8 was announced. ...while such a thing would help improve typographic control, it could also improve a lot of technicalities related to serving fonts on the web. Currently, accessing variations of a typeface requires loading multiple files. With a variable font format, a set of masters could be packaged in a single file, allowing not only for more efficient files, but also for a vast increase in design flexibility. If you're hungry for more technical knowledge about how font interpolation works internally, there's tons of resources to be learned from last year's article on the topic and even a demo to play with. It's exciting times for Web typography, peeps.



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