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
Robofont 2.0 is getting closer. Frederik Berlaen presented some of the new features that the UFO-based font editor will deliver to its users.
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By Roberto Arista
The dream is making a fully automated set of processes to create variable fonts. But the reality is a little bit tougher. Creating variable fonts from legacy families is a challenge today. How has Monotype solved this problem?
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By Toshiya Izumo
How do clients and end users measure quality? Jean Baptiste Levée’s talk is well-structured and clear and raises many honest points that go beyond slider movement and the role of a designer as a “problem-solver”.
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By Ferdinand Ulrich
This presentation of the Microsoft employees was two-fold: Peter Constable gave insight on the development of the font variations specification, how its implementation is progressing and shared how the spec might evolve in the future. Rob McKaughn shared some experimental ideas on how variable fonts might act responsively in every sense of the word: as way to assist readability, perhaps also to those with reading disorders.
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By Tilmann Hielscher
