Every next level demands something different. Whether we talk about life or technology, both demand changes and upgrades with time because progress or success is impossible without change. If we consider web designing, then it is obvious that designers tend to change their strategies and ideas about website designs. They have to come up with new techniques or thoughts to make their clients’ websites more friendly and handy for their customers. Everyone demands ease for them and their customers. To get that ease and friendliness, the world had been introduced to a new kind of font for flexible design at the ATypI conference in Warsaw, i.e. “a variable font”.
This Variable font has been jointly developed by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe and they describe it as “a single font file that behaves like multiple fonts”. Just think of a single font file that is featured with flexibility of width, weight, and other attributes with no increased file size. This means a lot especially for the designers who have to take special care of design file size while incorporating in the website designs as heavy files take a time to upload, which is not good for website performance.
Just think of shrinking or growing width of a symbol or hieroglyph slight to put up narrow and wide viewpoints. Just imagine that you can raise the height of your favorite font on a touch or sharpen brand letters in ways you intended, for any purpose. Just think of curbing descenders indiscernible so that headings can be set nice and firm without letters rolling into one another. Just imagine if all this is happening live on the web as a part of responsive website design.
Experts from the four companies along with some high up independent contributors have been working for more than 1 year on the significant improvement of the OpenType font file specification that now encompasses a ground-breaking technology known as OpenType Font Variations. John Hudson writes, “While earlier font interpolation technologies emerged from the font format wars of the early 1990s, and was developed and championed by an individual, competing software companies, OpenType variable fonts are the product of a new collegiality aimed not only at defining a common standard but also interoperable implementations.”
It is expected that design tools will definitely help designers to make flexible typographic decisions, but this flexible design is a bit complex. You need to understand this complexity so that you can build better tools.