Creative Knowledge Share* — Typography #2
By Maarten van Disseldorp
Creative at VBAT
On Thursday the 21st of February Lukas Paltram, Creative Director at Dalton Maag paid us another visit to introduce us to the latest developments in type design.
In the summer of 2016 Lukas had shown us the body of work from Dalton Maag’s catalogue, preceded by a brief and witty history lesson in typography. This time around we’re keen to hear about OpenType Variable Fonts. OpenType has had a huge impact on the type scene in recent years.
Earlier in the year this article on the Adobe blog “The Top 8 Typography Trends for Graphic Design in 2019” mentioned:
“Variable Fonts + Kinetic Type “Possibly, one of the greatest type discoveries, yet.””
First up was a general update on Dalton Maag’s work. The London based studio launched several custom fonts in the last 24 months: Airbnb Cereal, US Today Unify, BBC Reith, to name but a few of the highlights.
BBC Reith — Scrutiny on many levels
BBC’s new custom typeface is a very interesting case, that Lukas presented in further detail by our request. This premium quality broadcasting company, known all over the world, has serious high standards in terms of accessibility, user experience and design. It’s also a public institution paid for by British tax payers, meaning any decision the BBC makes has to be justified.
BBC Reith was developed in conjunction with the BBC GEL team (Global Experience Language). Their website is a gold mine of user experience and design knowledge, containing meticulously guidelines assets for screen based design.
Besides Gill Sans the BBC was using another 11 different typefaces, resulting in a huge bill for licenses annually.
“They didn’t have one typeface that worked in all situations, so developing a custom typeface was as much a financial decision, as it was a functional one — Lukas Paltram”
From the start it was decided to develop a sans and a serif version. Both in five weights, ranging from light to extra bold, with a true italic cursive style. That means a double storey “a” becomes a single storey “a” once italicised. And a few condensed versions for good measure.
Because BBC Reith Sans and a Serif have exactly the same proportion, exchanging them causes no reflow problems and in animation it looks seamless. Read more on BBC Reith here and here.
Dalton Maag was founded almost 30 years ago. Like their clients, the team of just under 50 people is very international. It enables them to deal with the many languages and subsequently writing systems, that fonts these days need to be able to support. With the exception of Chinese, Japanese and Korean, all other languages can be covered in-house, but by partnering up with others these Asian languages can also supported.
The job of a type designer has rapidly changed in the last 5–10 years, because of all kinds of new and enhanced technologies. Dalton Maag have made fonts especially catering for the Amazon Kindle e-reader and for MagicLeap One augmented reality headset screens. Nowadays typefaces can also be kinetic, adaptive, respond to various parameters and user input. This is where variable fonts come in.
OpenType Variable Fonts
The idea behind this new font technology: one single font file houses multiple variations of the font. This can be in terms of weight (thin–black), width (condensed–extended) and posture (roman–italic). It results in a much smaller file size, than all separate fonts combined, vastly improving the performance of websites.
“Over half of all mobile site visits are abandoned if the page doesn’t load within three seconds — Google Data”
Now you can beef up or slim down, stretch or pinch, and skew with ease, all within the parameters set by the designer. As an added bonus animating these kinds of fonts is super easy. It works natively in recent versions of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. The numeric properties can be used in CSS directly as well.
Currently Dalton Maag has three typeface available as variable font: Venn, Mokoko and Objektiv.
Demo time! Lukas fired up Adobe Illustrator to show Venn VF by Dalton Maag. The sliders make it easy to quickly change the appearance of Venn.
One of the most clever examples that Lukas shared with us was this one. A responsive website set in Venn VF. It totally makes sense to combine both technologies.
This was followed by a couple of fun and unexpected implementations:
• Muybridge Regular by Laurence Penney, named after the famous photographer applies VF technology to an illustration via a time slider.
• Cheee Variable by James T. Edmondson, which can be found here .
It has three sliders that are highly unusual, but very amusing: Temperature, yeast and gravity can all manipulate this cheesy typeface.
• More technically advanced and experimental examples were VF fonts hooked up to a camera — Getting closer to the lens triggered the type to become more condensed — and another were the amount of sound affected the weight of the type. The final example was pretty clever. Andrew J’s video instantly shows the match made in heaven between augmented reality and variable fonts, as it improves the legibility greatly.
Thank you Lukas for your enthusiastic presentation!
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Links
V-fonts is a great resource to find and test drive variable fonts.
Lukas’ colleague Bianca Berning wrote a very useful article about variable fonts that can be found here:
More about variable fonts in Adobe Illustrator can be found here.
*Creative Knowledge Share is an internal VBAT platform to enlighten and educate. These short sessions provide the opportunity for our creatives to get inspired and brush up on new skills.
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written by Maarten van Disseldorp, Creative at VBAT
edited by Connie Fluhme, PR at VBAT
