During the three days of the second TYPO Labs conference 2017 the TYPO team covered all talks on the blog. But you cannot just read about the presentations and workshops, all talks are also available as video for you to rewatch whenever you fancy.
Lots of talks and workshops covered the topic of FontLab – four of them are summarized below. Sessions by Adam Twardoch, Yuri Yarmola and Thomas Phinney.
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By Luc(as) de Groot
The panel led by Adam Twardoch, featuring Matthew Rechs from Adobe Typekit, David Berlow of The Font Bureau, Ivo Gabrowitsch for Monotype and Alexandra Korolkova from Paratype set out to find some solutions for variable font issues that can’t be solved by sliders or dials – how will they affect the market for fonts? Despite differing opinions and viewpoints, the one thing all panelists seemed to agree on is that nothing is set in stone. Yet.
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By Tilmann Hielscher
Dominik Röttsches and Behdad Esfahbod – The guys from Google presented the improvements since their last presentation in ATypI Warsaw.
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By Roberto Arista
Yuri Yarmola and Thomas Phinney presented improvements to one of the key parts of the application. The sometimes funnily chaotic presentation showed that we’ll have a lot to look forward to in the final version.
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By Radek Sidun
While the major chunk of this years Typo Labs talks were dedicated to variable fonts, this last panel tried to look even further ahead. What are the issues imposed by the nearly universal model of boxed letters and how could they be overcome? Sahar Afshar, Rob McKaughan, Victor Gaultney, Toshi Omagari, John Hudson and Bianca Berning discussed in a panel led by Just van Rossum.
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By Tilmann Hielscher
How to deal with Chinese fonts for responsive design on different devices today? Chinese fonts normally have over 25.000 characters in a set of one font. By responsive design, the font should be changed diversely on the website from design to design and device to device. While Latin web font size has been achieved to be under 100 KB, Chinese font size is between 5 and 20 MB because of the amount of characters. Jeff Wu showed us his experience and how he solved these issues.
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By Toshiya Izumo
Amélie Bonet looked into the close correlation between production and design work, fundamental when creating Devanagari typefaces. Devanagari is most used in northern India, but proclaimed by the government as main script. A big decision, based on the fact that there are 12 other wide-spread languages, written in eight other scripts. But Devanagari is used to express the official language Hindi.
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By Rik Watkinson
John Hudson presented four interesting case studies where variable fonts technology can make a difference.
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By Roberto Arista
Marianna Paszkowska, font developer at Monotype presented a playful Variable Fonts project that she had been working on together with quite a large team from the company. What at the first glance looked as “only” a fun project on Variable Fonts could also be seen as an approach to answer the question about how many choices should be actually given to the end user of design.
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By Verena Gerlach
Nicole Dotin introduced bash, a command language to be written in a shell script, run by Terminal. Exactly! The powerful tool, that can do terrible damage to your computer!
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By Rik Watkinson
Audience’s darlings Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer and Georg Seifert were announced as the two “Glyphs Guys”, the crowd giving a loud welcome applause. After a year with a lot having happened, the two founders of Glyphs once more announced a “world premier”.
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By Verena Gerlach
