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 <i>could</i> have been a truly "new era of type design" but never took off.<p>See <a href="http://www.metaflop.com/modulator" rel="nofollow">http://www.metaflop.com/modulator</a> 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 <i>The Concept of a Meta-Font</i> [1], published in <i>Visible Language</i>, 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.)<p>Unfortunately METAFONT as envisioned by Knuth never gained much adoption by other font designers, for (AFAICT) two reasons:<p>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.<p>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 <i>about</i> the shape of each letter and come up with symbolic descriptions of each, parametrized across the whole family (see Knuth's article <i>The letter S</i> [4] on his struggles with doing this for just one character).<p>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 <i>Designing New Typefaces with Metafont</i> [5].<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.zigzaganimal.be/elements/the-concept-of-metafont.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.zigzaganimal.be/elements/the-concept-of-metafont....</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/19.1/lessons-learned-from-metafont.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/19.1/...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.4/meta-font-metamathematics-and-metaphysics-comments-on-donald-knuths-article-161.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.4/...</a> / <a href="https://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR136.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR136.pdf</a><p>[4]: <a href="http://www.cnd.mcgill.ca/~ivan/Papers/The%20letter%20S.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnd.mcgill.ca/~ivan/Papers/The%20letter%20S.pdf</a><p>[5]: <a href="http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1074/CS-TR-85-1074.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1074/CS-TR-8...</a>
A system and method for letting "The Marketing Guy" choose and design the font instead of a trained graphic designer.<p>This isn't going to end well.<p>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.
This concept of a parametric font is the modern-day reincarnation of Donald Knuth's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont</a> .
Iosevka is also parametric, but fixed for a given TTF, as far as I can tell.<p>Very nice for coding.<p><a href="https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka</a>
It looks really, really bad at my browser's current size:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/ZvyLwjB.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/ZvyLwjB.png</a><p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/LC9cive.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/LC9cive.png</a>
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<p>If not, this looks like some bad trademark abuse, as everyone here seems to think this is somehow done by Google :(
What's the usefulness of this?<p>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.<p>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.
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
What a wonderful way to add massive complexity to font rendering while delivering spectacularly little value.<p>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.
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.
I'm collecting Chinese fonts for a project for a deep learning course.<p>Is there a tool where I can generate TTFs with different parameters to change the whole Unicode character set, not just ASCII?
I've spent so much time playing with the parameters that now letters don't make any sense to me.<p>edit: also it's absolutely gorgeous, well done
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".