Parametric fonts are cool. I think it's a stretch to say things like "Opening up to a new era of type design" though. Yes, the feature of "variable fonts" was added to the OpenType specification somewhat recently, in September 2016. But before that there was Adobe's "multiple master fonts", and even before that, there was Knuth's METAFONT, something that could have been a truly "new era of type design" but never took off.
See http://www.metaflop.com/modulator for an example of parametric fonts, inspired by Knuth's system: you can drag the sliders to adjust various font parameters, and get many different fonts. Knuth's article The Concept of a Meta-Font [1], published in Visible Language, is a classic. As you read the article he plays various tricks with the fonts as he describes them; it's a delightful read. (His followup article "Lessons learned from Metafont" [2] is also interesting.)
Unfortunately METAFONT as envisioned by Knuth never gained much adoption by other font designers, for (AFAICT) two reasons:
1. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a response [3] pointing out that it is not possible to mechanize all typefaces into a single one, which although a valid point (the article is great), attacks a straw man, arguing against an absurd claim that Knuth never even suggested IMO. So some may have got the wrong impression from it.
2. More importantly, as Richard Southall or Chuck Bigelow (I forget who) said, most type designers think with shapes; they don't think about shapes. Only a mind like Knuth's would prefer to think deeply about the shape of each letter and come up with symbolic descriptions of each, parametrized across the whole family (see Knuth's article The letter S [4] on his struggles with doing this for just one character).
Knuth has often said that we understand things better when we can teach them to a computer, and I still have hope for a future with parametric fonts that are better "understood": not because the shapes will be better, but simply because humanity will be better off with a deeper understanding of letterforms. But I think that whatever the technology, the task of parametrizing shapes will run into similar challenges, some of which were described in the above-mentioned articles and say Richard Southall's Designing New Typefaces with Metafont [5].
> Parametric fonts are cool. I think it's a stretch to say things like "Opening up to a new era of type design" though. Yes, the feature of "variable fonts" was added to the OpenType specification somewhat recently, in September 2016. But before that there was Adobe's "multiple master fonts", and even before that, there was Knuth's METAFONT, something that could have been a truly "new era of type design" but never took off.
I think the reason it's a stretch to say "opening up to a new era of type design" has less to do with the tech itself, and more the lack of implementation/support. variable fonts seem promising because they were a joint effort by apple, microsoft, google, and adobe (i.e. the major browser vendors plus the major design software vendor), but it won't be a new era until we can finally use these things. when arbitrary axes for interpolation are well supported in CSS using something like a GX font file, and when they're supported in adobe photoshop, indesign etc, I think that will be the point when we can adopt the tech, and when the "new era" can really begin.
I thought the problem was that font designers didn't like creating their font in a text editor.
The whole system seemed to be designed to cater to users who were both computer programmers and typographic artists. That's a demographic set that may consist of a single member: Donald Knuth.
A system and method for letting "The Marketing Guy" choose and design the font instead of a trained graphic designer.
This isn't going to end well.
Have you ever seen a font and thought "oh, that's ugly" but it's really hard to put into words exactly why? Font design is all about aesthetics and custom hand-tweaking every single curve of every single letter and making them look exactly right.
Presumably the designer is setting the constraints.
That's already a problem, modern typefaces will have 10+ weights, with 5+ variations within each weight, 50+ fonts in total.
It's quite easy for The Marketing Guy to make an ugly layout with those options, but for a skilled craftsman having that many options lets them fine tune a design. Same here.
It's also cut off at 2560x1440 on a Chrome web browser. Dunno how anybody can get excited about a font by Google that even Google can't figure out how to layout properly in a Google browser.
Does this actually have anything to do with Google?
From what i can tell, prototypo is a completely separate startup company with some per-month pricing plan
If not, this looks like some bad trademark abuse, as everyone here seems to think this is somehow done by Google :(
Part of the reason I ask is because while I would trust a UI designer to design the layout, colors, for an application, I think font design isn't as simple because there's a lot of factors that go into it, in some ways scientific and some ways artistic. I wouldn't trust someone who isn't trained in font/typeface design to use a tool like this.
Also: On Safari, this took maybe 5-8 seconds to load, and bogged down the entire browser for that time. Afterwards it took a lot of power to render something else on the page. For something that is only showcasing a font demo to take up that much power is pretty crazy.
Generally: it's a way to tweak a font family for use in a specific design context. Obvious parameters would be weight and width, but others could be imagined as well.
In the case of Prototypo, it looks like you tweak things upstream, and then generate concrete font files for each variant you want; those are what you then use in your project.
This still has the downside though of having to distribute multiple fonts, though, even if they're related.
Looking into the future, I wonder if it will ever make sense to push that downstream, and distribute one parametric font to clients. You could then use some styling language on the client end to have the client render the variants you want...
Pre-link-click: Ooo another site by Google these are usually pretty cool; at least they're well made...
First impression: LOL this site was made by Google?! Page load is atrocious. Interaction using mobile is very bad.
Lasting impression: This is like some weird developer designer hybrid that encourages...I don't even know...Extra....Weird...serifs
I'm just about 100% positive at this point that Google had nothing to do with this.
I can't find anything internally that makes me believe we did (and i've looked really hard)
Best not to confuse this demo of their parametric font, with the idea of parametric fonts in the first place. This page tries to vary the font as you scroll etc., which is just a (suboptimal) way of interactively demonstrating the font parameters, but not the point.
As for the value: the entire Computer Modern family of typefaces (used in TeX/LaTeX and friends) was generated with METAFONT which embodies the idea of font generation through "pens, programs, and parameters" -- the regular, bold, italic (even typewriter) variants of the font, and at various point sizes, are generated from common font definitions. Similarly the shapes of the loops in say p and d, etc. This ensures consistency and lets you experiment. (Though to be honest, very few people have successfully designed good font families with this approach.)
The articles that I mentioned in the other comment are better at seeing what's the point.
> 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 depending 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.
Wow, what a cynical viewpoint for a very cool, useful technology that we've been begging for for quite a while. Maybe you're confusing the demo with practical applications, but this is a demo.
You don't see the point, but you think it delivers little value. You don't understand it, but you're going to assert as fact that it's unhelpful. I don't wish you luck with that perspective, it's ignorance followed promptly by pontificating, not merely contrary or skeptical.
I also wasn't that impressed by the fact that I had to wait a few seconds for it to work. A font demo -especially a parametric font demo- really should be instant.
The heavily animated demo is worrying. Animation is making the Web very unpleasant lately. It's extremely distracting when trying to consume text content. Please don't animate your fonts.
I really hope this doesn't become popular like Lato and Montserrat. This is horrible to me as a dyslexic. It's near unreadable and distracting with the constant size changes.
Very cool. I'm seeing a future where fonts are stored as a series of transformations rather than a bunch of bitmaps/glyphs/vectors. A client could have specifications for adapting any font to make it more readable for their particular set of eyes while letting the font maintain a unique "look".
The vast majority of fonts are not stored as bitmaps. Most font formats store glyphs as vectors with a variety of additional information for pixel hinting, ligatures and probably a handful of other details that I can't even think of off the top of my head.
[+] [-] svat|8 years ago|reply
See http://www.metaflop.com/modulator for an example of parametric fonts, inspired by Knuth's system: you can drag the sliders to adjust various font parameters, and get many different fonts. Knuth's article The Concept of a Meta-Font [1], published in Visible Language, is a classic. As you read the article he plays various tricks with the fonts as he describes them; it's a delightful read. (His followup article "Lessons learned from Metafont" [2] is also interesting.)
Unfortunately METAFONT as envisioned by Knuth never gained much adoption by other font designers, for (AFAICT) two reasons:
1. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a response [3] pointing out that it is not possible to mechanize all typefaces into a single one, which although a valid point (the article is great), attacks a straw man, arguing against an absurd claim that Knuth never even suggested IMO. So some may have got the wrong impression from it.
2. More importantly, as Richard Southall or Chuck Bigelow (I forget who) said, most type designers think with shapes; they don't think about shapes. Only a mind like Knuth's would prefer to think deeply about the shape of each letter and come up with symbolic descriptions of each, parametrized across the whole family (see Knuth's article The letter S [4] on his struggles with doing this for just one character).
Knuth has often said that we understand things better when we can teach them to a computer, and I still have hope for a future with parametric fonts that are better "understood": not because the shapes will be better, but simply because humanity will be better off with a deeper understanding of letterforms. But I think that whatever the technology, the task of parametrizing shapes will run into similar challenges, some of which were described in the above-mentioned articles and say Richard Southall's Designing New Typefaces with Metafont [5].
[1]: http://www.zigzaganimal.be/elements/the-concept-of-metafont....
[2]: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/19.1/...
[3]: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.4/... / https://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR136.pdf
[4]: http://www.cnd.mcgill.ca/~ivan/Papers/The%20letter%20S.pdf
[5]: http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1074/CS-TR-8...
[+] [-] tribby|8 years ago|reply
I think the reason it's a stretch to say "opening up to a new era of type design" has less to do with the tech itself, and more the lack of implementation/support. variable fonts seem promising because they were a joint effort by apple, microsoft, google, and adobe (i.e. the major browser vendors plus the major design software vendor), but it won't be a new era until we can finally use these things. when arbitrary axes for interpolation are well supported in CSS using something like a GX font file, and when they're supported in adobe photoshop, indesign etc, I think that will be the point when we can adopt the tech, and when the "new era" can really begin.
[+] [-] jandrese|8 years ago|reply
The whole system seemed to be designed to cater to users who were both computer programmers and typographic artists. That's a demographic set that may consist of a single member: Donald Knuth.
[+] [-] smlacy|8 years ago|reply
This isn't going to end well.
Have you ever seen a font and thought "oh, that's ugly" but it's really hard to put into words exactly why? Font design is all about aesthetics and custom hand-tweaking every single curve of every single letter and making them look exactly right.
[+] [-] dagw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SippinLean|8 years ago|reply
That's already a problem, modern typefaces will have 10+ weights, with 5+ variations within each weight, 50+ fonts in total.
It's quite easy for The Marketing Guy to make an ugly layout with those options, but for a skilled craftsman having that many options lets them fine tune a design. Same here.
[+] [-] 0x4a42|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nayuki|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amyjess|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimish|8 years ago|reply
Very nice for coding.
https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
[+] [-] dgfgfdagasdfgfa|8 years ago|reply
Pretty sure you can do all the transformations indicated on the page in 'native' metafont.
[+] [-] lwlml|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|8 years ago|reply
http://i.imgur.com/ZvyLwjB.png
http://i.imgur.com/LC9cive.png
[+] [-] ericfrederich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DannyBee|8 years ago|reply
If not, this looks like some bad trademark abuse, as everyone here seems to think this is somehow done by Google :(
[+] [-] vitus|8 years ago|reply
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Spectral
Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be a connection.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yladiz|8 years ago|reply
Part of the reason I ask is because while I would trust a UI designer to design the layout, colors, for an application, I think font design isn't as simple because there's a lot of factors that go into it, in some ways scientific and some ways artistic. I wouldn't trust someone who isn't trained in font/typeface design to use a tool like this.
Also: On Safari, this took maybe 5-8 seconds to load, and bogged down the entire browser for that time. Afterwards it took a lot of power to render something else on the page. For something that is only showcasing a font demo to take up that much power is pretty crazy.
[+] [-] jandrese|8 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I can't imagine seeing myself going "I need something with the Times New Roman curvature, but thicker serifs..."
[+] [-] phlakaton|8 years ago|reply
In the case of Prototypo, it looks like you tweak things upstream, and then generate concrete font files for each variant you want; those are what you then use in your project.
This still has the downside though of having to distribute multiple fonts, though, even if they're related.
Looking into the future, I wonder if it will ever make sense to push that downstream, and distribute one parametric font to clients. You could then use some styling language on the client end to have the client render the variants you want...
[+] [-] db48x|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derfnugget|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DannyBee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwasehasdwi|8 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong, it's cool, I just don't see the point. And I don't look forward to my battery life being used for pointless sugar.
[+] [-] svat|8 years ago|reply
For a better demo (that does not use the same tech), see http://www.metaflop.com/modulator -- you vary the parameters, then a fixed font is generated that you can download and use. (I mentioned this in another comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14604890)
As for the value: the entire Computer Modern family of typefaces (used in TeX/LaTeX and friends) was generated with METAFONT which embodies the idea of font generation through "pens, programs, and parameters" -- the regular, bold, italic (even typewriter) variants of the font, and at various point sizes, are generated from common font definitions. Similarly the shapes of the loops in say p and d, etc. This ensures consistency and lets you experiment. (Though to be honest, very few people have successfully designed good font families with this approach.)
The articles that I mentioned in the other comment are better at seeing what's the point.
[+] [-] tribby|8 years ago|reply
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 depending 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
[+] [-] SippinLean|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcwalton|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mturmon|8 years ago|reply
Who would think this is compelling enough to put within the elevator pitch for the concept?
[+] [-] cmurf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biocomputation|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshMnem|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alikoneko|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgot-my-pw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] placeybordeaux|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterburkimsher|8 years ago|reply
Is there a tool where I can generate TTFs with different parameters to change the whole Unicode character set, not just ASCII?
[+] [-] joefkelley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smnscu|8 years ago|reply
edit: also it's absolutely gorgeous, well done
[+] [-] savolai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnovd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] platinumrad|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lwlml|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|8 years ago|reply