Variable Fonts, a New Kind of Font for Flexible Design

Tim Brown, head of typography for Adobe:

Just minutes ago, at the ATypI conference in Warsaw, the world was introduced to a new kind of font: a variable font. Jointly developed by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe, a variable font is, as John Hudson put it, “a single font file that behaves like multiple fonts”. Imagine a single font file gaining an infinite flexibility of weight, width, and other attributes without also gaining file size — and imagine what this means for design.

This looks great. I was a big fan of Adobe’s Multiple Master typefaces back in the ’90s, but they never really took off.

★ Thursday, 15 September 2016