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We haven’t had to talk about changing font formats since the ’90s, so people have gotten very comfortable with things. People got used to how it was and how it worked. For a very long time – a decade or more – the technology and the licensing models for type stayed pretty much the same. NS: In many cases you can probably go on a file sharing website and do the same thing.

FONTSTAND RENTING FONT DOWNLOAD

IR: I know several studios where you can download a whole collection right from the main page. NS: Yeah, but most of the foundries realized that if someone is really determined to get the font data, they’ll probably get it one way or another anyway. People, especially super conservative foundries, thinking they would lose their fonts online. I remember quite a lot of problems with that as well. The market always expected to have control over fonts. It was something for designers and developers to play with.

Thinking about tomorrow in a technological way, it was kind of expected that web fonts would become popular, but nobody was sure. But the “type today” of what’s possible today is different from the “type today” of what is popular or the most relevant in mainstream practice. And now variable fonts are a reality and the possibilities are becoming really interesting. NS: Yeah, like when web fonts were just becoming a thing, I was really interested in that early on. IR: HTML and everything around that, right? I’ve always been interested in the type of tomorrow. Then the OpenType variable fonts announcement happened, and it’s like, “Oh, we can skip that awkward transitional phase.” I think that’s really cool. Originally, I thought there would be this in-between period of people making hacks to get stuff to work until there was actually a formal specification for it. NS: I started writing about this stuff a few years ago, publishing things on A List Apart. The idea of a reaction to the user has already been invented.”

We’ve already got some nice interfaces there. When I saw the presentation about Variable Fonts, this was the first thing that came to mind.

About Marko Dugonjić’s experiment of changing the font size the closer or further from the screen you are. IR: I remember one of your lectures about responsive web design several years ago. There are some places where, yeah, that’s very much what’s going on. NS: If you’re talking about “type today” in a broader sense, it depends a lot on the context, because even with the technology, you could talk about variable fonts as being the most “today” thing out there in the type world. IR: Ok, but getting back to the subject: Where are we now? You’ve been observing the industry for a while probably like me, for over 10 years, right? What do you think? Papanek Typeface by Nick Sherman Margo Typeface by Nick Sherman Flight Center Gothic Typeface by Nick Sherman Forester Typeface by Nick Sherman Strike Typeface by Nick Sherman Kultur Typeface by Nick Sherman I have a long list of typefaces that are complete enough that I can use them for my purposes and those of the people that are paying me to start them, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting most of them on the retail market with any expectation that they’re totally polished. They’re just in various stages of completion. Nick Sherman: Right now, my day-to-day work is split about 50/50 between web design and custom-type design.ĭavid Jonathan Ross: You don’t see it, but I think you, Nick, have more type families than I do. Ilya Ruderman: I’m looking for any observations about the current times, about technologies today, about what “today” means for you guys.

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