I'm building a typeface of 56 fonts using a couple of axes: weight and width. In other words, I have seven weights, four widths of each weight, and italics of everything.
Is there a best-practices way of organizing all this? I could toss them all into one big mega-family or create four separate families centered around the four different weights. Any insight/opinions? Pros/cons/suggestions?
Comments
Any set of fonts that exceeds the old Windows 4-style family is by its nature liable to be technically implemented — via the name table and, now, the STAT table — as multiple family groupings: as several 4-style families, as a single mega-family, and possibly other sub-families based on e.g. weight-width-slope attributes.
So the product family approach is really quite an open one, and the only limit on how many different groupings you want to offer customers is really how confusing it might get for those customers. Try to think about what sorts of groupings will be most useful to customers, or ask them.
The two approaches I've seen to date, mostly, are:
1) Group the fonts by width as separate families: Glurbish, Glurbish Condensed, Glurbish Extended, etc.
2) Make them one big super-family.
I tend to prefer (2) myself. But aside from that, what I really hate is having different families that do this differently. The reason I hate this is that style mapping across the families is then broken. I have experienced this with Adobe’s Acumin, which uses (1). In the abstract, that approach is fine, if not what I would do. But when I tried to switch to Acumin from another family, I discovered how much extra work this difference created for me.
https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-font-stretch
This is not ideal, and the MS "WWS" model was nice enough, but I think the idea of named widths is becoming anachronistic with VF
When saying separate families to "sell and market", is it meaning, for example, creating four separate product pages for the four sub-families that a buyer would have to navigate to each separate page individually... or creating one product page that displays the mega-family but also has the four sub-family buying options within it?