Decovar – A multistyle decorative variable font

Decovar – A multistyle decorative variable font(typenetwork.com)

64 points by davelab6 9 years ago | 19 comments

j-pb 9 years ago |

Like the vulcans say: "Infinity ugliness in infinite combinations."

Seriously I couldn't find one decent looking version of that font...

webmaven 9 years ago | |

Then you really aren't trying hard enough.

dsr_ 9 years ago |

That's pretty cool, but in order to use it on my desktop, do I need an all-new font widget that can control every aspect of the specification? Or do I fiddle on a webapp until I get the one that I want, download it and use it as normal... and now I have a thousand variants of Decovar that I have to squint at very carefully to differentiate?

I'm not complaining about choice, I just want to know if anybody has thought about usability.

davelab6 9 years ago | |

Yes, all applications now need an all-new font widget. The first program with such a widget is https://github.com/googlei18n/fontview

akita-ken 9 years ago | |

If you clone the repo (or download the .UFO files from the sources folder), you can find all the variations with different skeletons and terminals that you can play around with in an editor like RoboFont.

and0 9 years ago |

This is really cool. Did anyone else try to drag the "Drag Me!" bubble for 10 seconds, though? Instead of the line itself, I mean.

dEnigma 9 years ago | |

Yup, it's like a door that says "PUSH" or a button that says "Click me!", I automatically -and I think understandably- assumed I should drag the thing it's written on, not the thing next to it

dberlow 9 years ago |

Wow, thanks for all your comments. I even clicked on the Drag sign myself. We can make it that way too.

Ugliness vs Beauty, is a subjective judgement, and if one person, or 1,000 thinks it either way, the type designer is usually trying to please just one person.

In this case, the designer is trying to please a range of tastes, in both print and animation, from subtle stroking of the style, barely perceptible like the sound your fingers make parting to drop a pin, which is one whole tradition in type use, to making your eyes bleed, the range of which variations are all about, and has been for centuries.

We'd certainly appreciate the Hacker News hackers' perspective on Use! User Interfaces! CSS, and how applications should continue to support variations, in more sensible ways.

You can do that here, and also there are several other places you can sound in if you start hacking around. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and many others will be offering pretty fonts soon. I felt it'd be good to make sure to get people's eyes to bleed first, to open them up. Thanks for that confirmation.

j-pb 9 years ago | |

Font is about readability. You can use it to convey emotion and style as well but readability must come first. It takes carefull tuning to achieve that in a stylistic font and I doubt it is possible at all in a font like this. The kerning in this thing is just painful. Additionally the rendering engine has to be even more complex then that stuff already is.

This entire thing is an anti feature, it looks worse and is less readable, makes the implementation of stuff harder, and nobody needs it, but hey some people can feel smug.

webmaven 9 years ago | | |

> but readability must come first.

Not so. Typefaces are (as with most two dimensional design) about communication. Legibility is merely the most straightforward means by which a typeface enables communication (of the text), but there are many other things that can be communicated (emotions, age, time, place, personality, intellect, attitude, sanity, ideology, and on and on).

Sure this typeface has some pretty extreme variations, and the interface certainly encourages the use of the entire gamut, but nothing says that you can't be subtle. Remember when drop-shadows were new and everything looked like it was levitating at least a half-inch off the background? Ignoring for the moment the "flat design" interregnum, we've used dropshadows ever since, but over time in a much more restrained way.

Anyway, this particular typeface is clearly meant as an eye-catching demo of the technology, and even a lighter touch still leaves you with an all-caps display font. Less overt and garish variations (along the lines of the older Multiple Master fonts) are possible and are clearly in the works: https://www.typenetwork.com/brochure/opentype-variable-fonts...

webmaven 9 years ago | |

dberlow, I am finding this really interesting (as well as your essay[0] on the work-in-progress that is Amstelvar[1]).

What tools are you using for the design process? Anything like Metapolator[2]?

Personally, I feel that the critiques here concerning "ugliness" are overblown, as will most who recall the work of designers such as David Carson[3] and publications like Emigre[4]. It actually isn't that hard to find combinations that "work" as a display typeface, although I would probably want to tweak them manually a bit before use.

BTW, if David Jonathan Ross and Alexandre Saumier Demers are taking feature requests for the Decovar demo page, it would be nice if the URL reflected the skeleton/terminal combination currently on the screen (and it was bookmark-able).

[0] https://www.typenetwork.com/brochure/opentype-variable-fonts...

[1] https://github.com/TypeNetwork/fb-Amstelvar

[2] https://github.com/metapolator/metapolator

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_(graphic_designer...

[4] http://www.emigre.com/EMagView.php

davelab6 9 years ago | | |

The fonts are made with freshly written extensions to the RoboFont editor; notably, the original source drawings are made in quadratic bezier splines, not the typical cubic ones.

Metapolator (a project I co-founded) uses Hobby splines and has not been used so far to develop Variable Fonts AFAIK.

I filed an issue for your nice suggestion, https://github.com/TypeNetwork/fb-Decovar/issues/6

tyingq 9 years ago | |

>Ugliness vs Beauty, is a subjective judgement

To some degree. I can't imagine, though, how this is useful: http://imgur.com/a/82c9w :)

davelab6 9 years ago | | |

I could see that being used in an advertisement where it taking a moment to figure out the text is intended

falsedan 9 years ago |

Sounds an awful lot like METAFONT.

thechao 9 years ago | |

The thing I absolutely miss the most from grad school is porting my advisor's whiteboard chicken scratch into parametric METAPOST graphics. It let us size & scope images to their target: posters, conference papers, slides, journal publications, etc.

webmaven 9 years ago | |

It does, doesn't it? There seems to be a fairly clear trail of inspiration from this and many similar ideas in the past.