Presented on Friday, 15 November, 2019 at beyond tellerrand Berlin
Variable fonts are an exciting and significant new development in font technology. Combining all the various widths and weights of a typeface within a single font file, this new format can increase both design possibilities and performance, while allowing for other axes of variation that can improve accessibility and user experience in ways never before possible. We’ll look at how this can strengthen brand voice and fidelity, react better to user context (screen size and resolution), and even allow greater user configuration (font size and contrast). All of this while loading fewer files and serving less data, helping improve page speed as well. It’s a whole new way of thinking about typography, and can be put into practice right away. We’ll look at a number of examples, and see how they have expanded the design language and landscape for a variety of organizations from a state government to a major sporting brand, and a few more in between.
I’ll also be showing the road ahead for web font performance with a sneak peak at what the W3C Web Font Working Group is researching, including a live demo of Google’s proof-of-concept showcasing the font serving speed increase potential.
[Note: the embedded presentation isn’t quite perfect in how it scales, but it’s at last mostly readable :)]