Google Fonts continues to add or ‘onboard’ more and more variable fonts every year. To accelerate the onboarding process, we have commissioned improvements to our process, with better tools and documentation. As new variable fonts often introduce new axes to the Google Fonts product, a key step in onboarding is registering definitions of new axes… Continue reading Axis Registration with Google Fonts
Industry leaders will reveal details of a major technological update to the OpenType standard. Participants include: David Lemon (Senior Manager of Type Development at Adobe), Peter Constable (Senior Program Manager at Microsoft), Behdad Esfahbod (Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead: Fonts & Text Rendering at Google) Ned Holbrook (Senior Software Engineer at Apple Inc.), and Simon… Continue reading Special OpenType Session
Michael Parson will present the work he has been conducting on his latest typeface. Koruption is the result of questions Parson had been considering about variable fonts. Rather than using this new technology to navigate with traditional features like weight, width, or slant, he wanted to explore how a regular typeface could be transformed into… Continue reading Exploring the Limits of Variable Fonts
Over the years, the OpenType specification has been improved and allows us to make advanced fonts. There are many benefits to all these new additions, like OpenType layout features, color, and support for variation, but this also makes it harder to spot problems. Many fonts contain issues; most of them are harmless, like incorrect Panose… Continue reading Polish Variable Fonts
One of the early milestones within the Harfbuzz project’s Boring Expansion Spec is the specification of an “avar v2” table, which defines how axes can be composed from other axes. This takes Font Bureau’s Parametric Axes system and Underware’s HOI (Higher Order Interpolation for Variable Fonts) to the next level; Crossland and Penney will demonstrate… Continue reading Mom, You Sure Can Rehydrate a Pizza
Some of São Paulo’s street signage from 1915 to 1973 still exists in the city. The project presented will review the history of those signs and creating a variable font inspired by them.
Did you ever wonder why existing design tools make you do so much repetitive work? Why is it difficult to get back to sketching once your design tools take over? This lecture will address sketching techniques; how to use the same content, parameters, and algorithms for magazines, posters, websites, specimens, graphs and identity manuals; live… Continue reading Code All Your Graphic Designs with PageBot, DrawBot and Variation Fonts
The last 25 years have created what I think of as the fog of modern typography. Now the combination of existing technologies, and new Technologies are spreading a whole new level of quality, functionality and performance over the foggy old system. While not directly breaking from the old, the new technologies allow us to clear… Continue reading Confessions of a variator