TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Tue May 14 18:25:51 EDT 2024
FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE
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Patrick Griffin on variable fonts and the future of type
Reflecting on the future of type in 2021, straight from Patrick Griffin's desk: The Future Of Fonts (Maybe). ...whereby the (Maybe) in the highfaluting title being the necessary contextual hand-washing, since what we're really talking about here is a tech slugger's third at-bat, and the count is 0-2. Of course the grand allusion here is to variable fonts (or variation fonts, or font variations), a technology that has been around in one form or another for almost three decades. [...] Font interpolation. The condensed version of digital font interpolation history is this: In the early 1990s, both Apple and Adobe introduced their own interpolative font technologies, respectively called GX Variations and Multiple Master. Quite a few fonts were made in both formats in the 90s, but for various reasons they never really took off with layout artists. So type designers stopped releasing interpolative fonts, though they kept using the technology in the background to build large font families. Most individual fonts in large families in use now come from some kind of interpolation under the hood. In the fall of 2016, the Open Type specification added support for variations, and since then that has been the go-to subject of presentations in pretty much every type design conference out there. Support for the stuff was duly added to both major font-building apps, and here were are now, entertain us. The 0-2 count. GX Variations failed mostly because Apple insisted the technology would only work on the Mac, which turned off the major layout design software manufacturers (Adobe, Corel, Quark) who were heavily vested in Windows at the time. The Multiple Master tech failed mostly because most layout artists were confused by it, and whatever application support was there for it proved to be spotty at best. So attempts at using interpolative fonts in the mainstream pretty much altogether stopped in the late 90s. Some, perhaps even most, font makers held on to the Multiple Master technology as an internal process to produce families, because it helped speed things up, allowed for extreme precision and more impressive output and, well, nerds like us just like to play with such tools. The third at-bat. The GX and MM technologies failed during an ancient time, when the only beast roaming the planet was the Printosaur---a time when everything was judged by its potential for print, long before the interwebs was a thing. About a dozen years after the public burial of both technologies, people got their ducks in a row about using fonts on the web. At some point a few years later, a few young webheads thought, Hey, what if web fonts can be interpolated!? And that is how you make a snowball and roll it down a hill. With this latest at-bat now, the major difference is that we are almost positive that web-driven technologies (as opposed to print-driven ones) have a much better shot at survival, even better odds at flourishing and going mainstream. Case in point: Variable fonts can now be used in Adobe Illustrator CC, and Adobe Photoshop CC. And they work quite well, within an impressively simple and efficient interface implementation. [...] So here's to the future of fonts. Maybe. |
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html |