The State of Variable Fonts in InDesign

• 3:30-4:00 pm Pre-Presentation Networking

• 4:00-5:45 pm Presentation

Variable fonts are a type of font file that allows for multiple styles—such as weight, width, or slant—to be contained within a single file, enabling greater design flexibility and efficiency.

It has been over eight years since they were first announced in Warsaw (at the ATypI conference, September 2016) by Adobe, Microsoft, Apple and Google. Thomas Phinney looks at variable fonts and shows how they work, including some “peaks under the hood” in a font editor, as well as demonstrations in InDesign.

Fnd out:

• How can you identify a variable font in InDesign (or on Adobe Fonts, Google Fonts, or MyFonts)?
• How does InDesign support them?
• How do they work in general, and in InDesign?
  What aspects of InDesign variable font support are still broken?
• What are the best uses for them?
  What are the craziest things you can do with them?
• How common are they, from Google, Adobe and others?

About the Presenter

Thomas Phinney has been involved with variable fonts and their precursors for decades, including before and after his 11 years at Adobe. He did his Master’s thesis on Extreme Form Change in Multiple Master Fonts, a precursor to modern variable font technology. Phinney designed Adobe Original typeface Hypatia Sans, and his team’s open-source typeface Science Gothic is a 4-axis variable font commissioned by Google Fonts. With Vassil Kateliev, he created and maintains a 4-axis variable font version of Google’s Material Design icons, the public open-source version of which is called Material Symbols, and has over 3600 icons.

In his time at Adobe (1997–2008), Phinney helped lead the conversion of the entire Adobe Type Library to OpenType. Phinney is also involved in the business of type, having been product manager for fonts at Adobe and Extensis, and CEO of FontLab. He has four patents, an MS in printing/typography from RIT, and an MBA from UC Berkeley. Phinney was on the board of the global typography association, ATypI, for more than 18 years, including a term as President and 15 years on the executive.

Phinney also has an active business as the world’s only consulting font detective, investigating those crimes against typography that are actually illegal, such as forging backdated documents using fonts that did not yet exist, or failing to meet a legally required point size. Defendants in his cases have included Justin Timberlake, will.i.am and the billionaire Russian oligarch who owns the largest private home in London.

Free Drawing

All attendees are eligible to participate in a free drawing. No purchase or donation is required. However, you must attend the presentation to be eligible. Prizes delivered electronically are available to anyone in the world. Physical prizes are available to anyone in the U.S. without a shipping charge. Winners from outside the U.S. who choose a physical prize must bear the cost of shipping.

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