I was just wondering whether it would be possible to implement a sort of ‘animation’ table in variable fonts, which would contain a sequence of settings for the axes –in some way connected with an interval definition. Basically exactly the same as if one makes a screen recording of a series of changes via sliders. One could make such a meta table programmable, and hence ‘non-fixed’ animations with fonts (which, of course, don’t have to contain letters by definition), for, for example, web purposes or in any other environment that supports variable fonts. Changing the animation would just mean changing the axes-settings in the table (with, for example, OTM). This way lightweight animations can be made, I reckon.
Undoubtedly some of you know (much) more about these kind of things than I do, especially when it comes to the complexity involved. One could also argue that non-professional end users do not want to play around with sliders and parameters, and consequently also not with such tables. However, I can imagine that such an ‘animation’ table could offer a lot of options for the somewhat more tech-savvy designers.
What do you think?
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I guess it seems non-crazy. After all, you can put a custom sample text string in the font....
The term ‘animation’ might be a bit misleading but is actually very fitting.
One thing I would use this for is to build a size axis from weight and width. If you could have several breakpoints it could be much nicer.
And there is not always the possibility to have extensiv custom CSS. Like in normal apps. It would be a usage nightmare if you need to send a complex table along with the font that explains what combination of sliders you need to set to get a certain result (one could add a lot of custom instances, but that would beat the purpose of variable fonts)
Well, I'm looking forward to when you start thinkingt about type network parametric axes
Web browsers already support dynamic, interactive animation using HTML5 canvas and javascript, but canvas, despite its potential, has never been widely adopted to the point of living up to that potential. Canvas can't imitate a variable font, of course, but given the limited interest web designers and developers have shown in it, what would be the compelling use of animations restricted mainly to typography and only to the predetermined and built-in axes of the fonts being used?
I'm not arguing against it, by the way. I'm really just asking what solid reasons exist, beyond it being sort of cool, are there to do it.