This is technically super impressive, especially the continuous “Casual” axis. I recommend reading the “Process” page; skip the design stuff if you want, but read about how the interpolation is done and how many glyphs have to be designed.
Since all the variants have the same metrics, this opens up some interesting possibilities for animation. For instance, highlighting text (like syntax errors?) by making it subtly throb or wiggle. Or having UI elements morph between light and bold text as they’re enabled/disabled.
(History lesson: back in the days of metal type, different sizes of the same typeface would often have slightly different shapes. At first this was just by whim, since each character’s mold (matrix) was cut by hand — the early Caslon types are drastically different at each size. Later, it was realized that small body sizes worked better when somewhat bolder and wider, while display sizes could be lighter and tighter. And the ink traps that helped preserve shapes during printing didn’t scale, so they were different at each font size.
All this got lost in “cold” photo and digital type in the 20th century. But there were some efforts starting in the late 80s to bring back optical spacing/ boldening, though they were impractical with the original PostScript and TrueType font formats. Also, I believe Donald Knuth’s Metafont system, which produced the standard TeX fonts, had some ability to produce new styles by interpolation.)
For instance, highlighting text (like syntax errors?) by making it subtly throb or wiggle. Or having UI elements morph between light and bold text as they’re enabled/disabled.
I really like both of those ideas. Tweening between variants and colors at the same time could be really interesting. I wonder what’s the best platform to play with this…
And thanks for pointing out the “Process” page. I didn’t look at that on my first pass.
If this gets made into a nerd font, I think I’d like it for some of the UI on my desktop. I don’t find it that appealing for code editing, but it looks like some very nice work.
This is technically super impressive, especially the continuous “Casual” axis. I recommend reading the “Process” page; skip the design stuff if you want, but read about how the interpolation is done and how many glyphs have to be designed.
Since all the variants have the same metrics, this opens up some interesting possibilities for animation. For instance, highlighting text (like syntax errors?) by making it subtly throb or wiggle. Or having UI elements morph between light and bold text as they’re enabled/disabled.
(History lesson: back in the days of metal type, different sizes of the same typeface would often have slightly different shapes. At first this was just by whim, since each character’s mold (matrix) was cut by hand — the early Caslon types are drastically different at each size. Later, it was realized that small body sizes worked better when somewhat bolder and wider, while display sizes could be lighter and tighter. And the ink traps that helped preserve shapes during printing didn’t scale, so they were different at each font size. All this got lost in “cold” photo and digital type in the 20th century. But there were some efforts starting in the late 80s to bring back optical spacing/ boldening, though they were impractical with the original PostScript and TrueType font formats. Also, I believe Donald Knuth’s Metafont system, which produced the standard TeX fonts, had some ability to produce new styles by interpolation.)
I really like both of those ideas. Tweening between variants and colors at the same time could be really interesting. I wonder what’s the best platform to play with this…
And thanks for pointing out the “Process” page. I didn’t look at that on my first pass.
If this gets made into a nerd font, I think I’d like it for some of the UI on my desktop. I don’t find it that appealing for code editing, but it looks like some very nice work.