Dave Crossland Variable components enable new ways to compress and express type forms, and are perhaps the most significant new feature of the OpenType format update finalized this year. With that industry standardization comes the possibility of fonts that work ‘everywhere’ (in all the American operating systems and design apps) with a significant file-size reductions. While this brings the biggest benefit to Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) type designers and foundries, the idea of glyph-level variation to compose full characters from multidimensional base pieces is useful for every writing system.
This presentation reviews how this works, both visually and technically, following Jeremie Hornus through his 10 year odessy of commissions from Renault, Google and others clients. We contextualize the work done in parallel by Apple to ship Ping Fang using their own glyph variation format, and the trade-offs involved in such format design decisions. We show how this was applied to Noto and Google Sans fonts. Finally, we show how you can get started with the new “variable component first” font editor, Fontra.