No font can do everything, nor should it! However, discovering the performance envelope of your font is particularly valuable if you can discover it early and use it to inform and refine the design of your typeface. This is why it’s important to create sequential tests that include but go beyond abstract testing ( glyphs to words, sentences, and paragraphs) and build to specific functional typographic roles in diverse real-world typography. It is also why seeing how your font interacts with the varied personalities evoked by graphic design is so useful. Plausible uses include but are not limited to ephemera, packaging, books, editorial design, web, wayfinding, environmental typography, and AR. Each of these stresses a font in different ways and is worth exploring. In EQX, we provide reusable SVG/HTML samples for all samples, including those for complex typography. Our incremental sample model also allows us and others to provide piecemeal contributions toward a valuable community library of typographically sophisticated use cases. The example tests provided with EQX are not exhaustive or complete. Instead, they exist to begin to characterize the broad range of what’s possible. We hope that this helps foster fruitful dialog about what kinds of samples are most useful on both a script and style or genre basis.
Sample Design for Font Testing in EQX
Eben Sorkin
