Variable Fonts

The variable font is a new kind of font format.

It represents the infinite possibility of customizing typography exactly the way you want it.

Previously you have had to download and install one font for each style (e. g. Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic etc.) sometimes causing a family of few variations to contain and require installation of twenty or more fonts.

A variable font, however, only consists of a single font file, one TTF. But this is not the primary benefit – the real magic is in the extended possibilities of customization you are able to make from this single file.

Variable fonts are extremely easy to use, and is a very powerful tool for a designer working with any type of lettering.

If you have Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign on your computer, you can try it right now with one of the fonts that are already installed, such as Acumin, Source Sans or Myriad Variable.

In the Character window, choose for example Acumin Variable. Here you have the option to change style: Condensed to Wide and Thin to Black.

But in addition to this, you also have the option click the Variable Font symbol:

Here you are able to set any weight between 100-900, width between 50-115, and slant between 0-12. This gives you over half a million ways to customize the type.

Weight, width and slant are in no way the only parameters you can set. Depending on the font, you can adjust anything, such as optical size, serif length and x-height. A variable font could in theory even contain completely different font styles and any variations between them.

Click here to see all my variable fonts!

Try out more samples of variable fonts at V-Fonts and Axis Praxis.

Google Developers about variable webfonts.

Download this document as a PDF

Created by Måns Grebäck
Copyrighted to Mans Greback AB
http://www.mansgreback.com