Tags: font

The Next Big Thing in Type

Over the course of a semester, students at UMPRUM Academy in Prague made variable fonts. I think Krabat might be my favourite.

Wakamai Fondue

A drag-and-drop tool for examining variable fonts (kind of like FontDrop but with more sliders to play with).

I didn’t get the name until I said it out loud.

What’s new in Microsoft Edge in the Windows 10 April 2018 Update - Microsoft Edge Dev BlogMicrosoft Edge Dev Blog

Service workers, push notifications, and variable fonts are now shipping in Edge.

Upcoming changes to the CSS you need for variable fonts | Clagnut

Rich enumerates some changes in how you set up variable fonts. So if you’re pulling in a font that has weight as an axis, you can now add this to your @font-face rule:

font-weight: 1 999;

I’m already very excited about variable fonts—I’m going to be positively giddy by the time Ampersand rolls around (which, by the way, you should totally go to—it’s going to be sooo good!).

Variable Fonts | DSType Foundry

Here’s an interesting twist on variable fonts: one of variable axes is serificity …serificousness …serifness. The serifs. The serifs, is what I’m trying to say.

One small point: it seems a bit of a shame that there are separate files for regular and italic—it would’ve been nice to have a variable axis for italicity …italicousness …ah, screw it.

Inside CSS | Clearleft

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be a fly on the wall at a CSS Working Group meeting, Richard has the inside scoop.

The consensus building is vital. Representatives from all the major browsers were in the room, collaborating closely by proposing ideas and sharing implementations. But most fundamentally they were agreeing together what should go in the specifications, because what goes in the specs is what gets built and ends up in the hands of users.

Ampersand: Interview with Mandy Michael – Clear(left) Thinking – Medium

I’m soooo excited that Mandy is speaking at Ampersand here in Brighton in June!

Be there or be square.

Variable Fonts

A simple resource for finding and trying variable fonts.

FontDrop!

A handy browser-based tool for examining font files to see which features they support.

It’s Dangerous to Go Stallone. Take Glyphhanger | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

You’ll need to be comfortable with using the command line, but this is a very useful font subsetting tool from those clever folks at Filament Group.

Shipping system fonts to GitHub.com · @mdo

A look at the font stack that Github is using.

How to use variable fonts in the real world | Clagnut

The gorgeous website for this year’s Ampersand conference might well be one of the first commercial uses of variable fonts in the wild. Here, Richard documents all the clever things Mark did to ensure good fallbacks for browsers that don’t yet support variable fonts.

Ampersand Web Typography Conference | 29 June 2018 | Brighton, UK

Save the date! The best web typography conference in the world is back in Brighton on June 29th, and this time it’s at the best venue: The Duke Of York’s.

In fact, you can do more than saving the date: you can snap up a super early bird ticket for whopping £85 saving.

Better Typography with Font Variants - Jonathan Harrell | CSS Blogger & Teacher, UI/UX Designer, Front-End Developer

A quick guide to all the font-variant-... stuff in CSS.

Spectral: A New Screen-First Typeface - Library - Google Design

A rather handsome looking free serif typeface based on Gargantua. Spectral is available under an Open Font License.

Silly hover effects and the future of web typography – Pixelambacht

These experiments with transitioning variable font styles on hover might be silly, but I can see the potential for some beautiful interaction design.

V6: Typography and Proportions | Rob Weychert

Rob walks us through the typographic choices for his recent redesign:

Most of what I design that incorporates type has a typographic scale as its foundation, which informs the typeface choices and layout proportions. The process of creating that scale begins by asking what the type needs to do, and what role contrasting sizes will play in that.

Inter UI font family

A nice free and open source font designed for digital interfaces:

Inter UI is a font for highly legible text on computer screens.

eBay’s Font Loading Strategy | eBay Tech Blog

Here’s the flow that eBay use for the font-loading. They’ve decided that on the very first page view, seeing a system font is an acceptable trade-off. I think that makes sense for their situation.

Interestingly, they set a flag for subsequent visits using localStorage rather than a cookie. I wonder why that is? For me, the ability to read cookies on the server as well as the client make them quite handy for situations like this.

Visions - A Literary Science Fiction Magazine

This forthcoming sci-fi quarterly publication looks intriguing:

Each issue contains a part of a previously untranslated novel as well as essays looking at the world through the lens of different writers.

I’m loving their typeface. It’s called Marvin. It was specially made for the magazine, and available to download and use for personal use for free.

Marvin gets its distinctive voice not only from its Art Nouveau vibe but also from its almost geometrically perfect construction. Its roundness and familiarity with Bauhaus typefaces shows its roots in geometric sans serifs at the same time.

The story of its (re)construction is fascinating. (Thanks for the heads-up, Jason.)