TRtribby·Jun 21, 2017
> What a wonderful way to add massive complexity to font rendering while delivering spectacularly little value.
I'll attempt to explain the value, because I don't think this demo is doing a good job of showing that. parametric and variable fonts might seem like "pointless sugar," but it's the combination of mostly two things that make this a huge deal: responsive typography for better legibility, and reducing the number and size of font files served over the web.
let's say I have four font files being used on my website -- regular, bold, italic, bold italic. let's say that's 50k per file, so 200k for four network requests. with a variable font, it's maybe ~70k for a single request. that's a huge improvement, but it's not even all that these fonts offer.
responsive typography (adjusting for the right font weight and characteristics depen
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ding on the size of the display) is very important for legibility.[1] The slick ultrathin fonts that look good on a 27" 5k display are unreadable on a smaller display. fonts optimized for body text look terrible when used at large sizes, hence the existence of "display" typefaces. there is so much bloat in having tons of different files for this, when the libraries that interpolate fonts in font creation software[2] can be used on the fly instead of during a compilation step.
font rendering is cheap, sending fonts over the wire is not -- so when you frame this new font tech as something that is just as much about speeding up the web as it is about speeding up the design process, it's a little less pointless.
1. https://alistapart.com/blog/post/variable-fonts-for-responsi...
2. https://github.com/LettError/MutatorMath