Imagine a typeface that reacts to different screen sizes. Or to different types of weather. A typeface that grows and shrinks in response to the stock market. Or to your mood. A font that becomes more vile as the discussing gets nastier. Or a font that censors itself.
Variable fonts, first introduced at ATypI in 2016, promise to be a revolution for how we design and use typefaces. They allow us to create flexible designs that can vary fonts in ways that were previously impossible.
The technology is very new. But while we're waiting for Apple, Microsoft and Google to implement the technology in browsers and smartphones, we can already start speculating how we could use it tomorrow.
In this workshop we'll look at the possibilities of variable fonts. From there we will dream up, design and implement our own variable font that can work in variety of different contexts. The end result will be a live demo of our own font working in the browser.
Frederik De Bleser is a PhD researcher at the Experimental Media Research Group in Atnwerp, Belgium. He is the creator of NodeBox, an open-source application for generative design and data visualization. He's also the creator of OpenType.js, a JavaScript library for working with typography on the web. He regularly teaches abroad, giving workshops and talks in Finland, Lithuania, Poland, France and the U.S. He's currently working on NodeBox Live, a version of NodeBox that runs on the web.