If you are unfamiliar with font technology/design, it is hard to emphasize just how much work must have went into producing this font. Take a look at all the different variable axes Roboto Flex supports [1]. I have never seen so many axes in a variable font.<p>I cannot imagine how much effort went into developing and testing this font; this is incredible work by Font Bureau.<p>[1] <a href="https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Flex?query=roboto#type-tester" rel="nofollow">https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Flex?query=roboto#t...</a>
It's so jarring to read an article about the excrutiating effort put into design minutiae, and then see this garrish undismissable dialog cover the top third of the screen every time you scroll up (at least on mobile).
My dream is to have a single nice variable font available pre-installed across all major desktop and mobile platforms that I can use without downloading custom fonts and suffering through additional font loading latency or layout shift.<p>In the mean time, I'm using the system font stack popularized by Bootstrap's reboot.css reset. It works great for eliminating font loading latency and layout shift, but AFAIK none of the fonts in there are variable, and they all render slightly differently in terms of font weight specified vs actual visual weight, which has been making life difficult.<p>This is a step in the right direction though, at least soon we'll have a variable font for one mobile platform in the system font stack, though I'm unsure yet how to take advantage of this since I'm not sure if there's a way to determine if the font we end up loading in the stack is actually variable.
The design of the header (slides down if you scroll up) combined with the banner above it makes for a terrible UX on a phone. It takes up so much space that you can barely read the article. The dropdown on scroll behavior is also so sensitive that it makes it really hard to stop it and read.
It is great to see more variable fonts landing. They really feel like the next evolution of typography.<p>The much beloved Inter comes to mind as well, which also has a variable version and is IMHO a little more elegant :
<a href="https://rsms.me/inter/" rel="nofollow">https://rsms.me/inter/</a>
I don't know but I always found Google's font choice, airy cold, disconnected and vapid. Not sure why I get that response but something just feels incredibly stale and impersonal.
> Font Bureau’s house standards for quality show up in a few subtle updates to Roboto’s neo-grotesque sans design, <i>including switching the default numeral style from tabular lining to proportional</i>...<p>Uhh why? Thanks, but no thanks
This is awesome and opens up a lot of doors for creative expression!<p><i>But it's 1.7 MB</i><p>Is there no way to reduce that?<p>It would be great if you could "compile" a pre-defined combinations of Axes values to only bundle what's needed for a design. I suppose flattening to SVG could help provided the text had captions for screen readers?
Here is an image from the article: <a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fBNygQoshN-VrK1f_Dxwy5bjTkaAgcFk6pcUts-9_R5Uhh3nmnrxVUX2JgOKKQ0ATgx8rIi6ggxiMBsCPiwZlrbPL6Nt9-gNuJ2jmz5_KU6VlH-MQg=w1064-v0" rel="nofollow">https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fBNygQoshN-VrK1f_Dxwy5bjTk...</a><p>Left is old, right is the new design. Yes, it maybe looks "cleaner", but now it is virtually impossible to distinguish the different levels of headings.<p>> Left: The original Material Design type ramp using Roboto. Right: The same ramp made simple and smoother with Roboto Flex’s regular weight with automatic optical size variations.<p>From what I know of typography, you want the different levels to be much more different than that.
As a programmer I have strong opinions about my monospace font, but if I want to make a UI or display very readable sans text what’s the best option? Roboto Flex? Inter?
Here's the github repo for the font: <a href="https://github.com/googlefonts/roboto-flex" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/googlefonts/roboto-flex</a><p>I always find it interesting to track the updates for google fonts on their repos (when possible), since you can see fixed bugs and also sometimes find people who've forked it to add features.
Oh my god that header design is such a obnoxious one. I feel like being solicitated physically and constantly. I have nothing bad for material design/roboto family but now I hate it.
This is so cool!<p>Now if something similar was available for a monospace font that Emacs and Visual Studio Code could use, I'd be very happy. I like using a condensed-width monospace font for explorer side panels like Treemacs. I currently use "M+ 1m" in Emacs.
Here's a tool to play with all the options. SO. MANY. SLIDERS! <a href="https://v-fonts.com/fonts/roboto-flex" rel="nofollow">https://v-fonts.com/fonts/roboto-flex</a>