How to make a dynamic/responsive typeface?

Thales Teodoro

Hi, it is my first post, so if I chose the wrong category, sorry.
Anyway, recently I get my design degree and with it the insecure of what pursuit. I had work experience in web development, UX and frontend development and typography classes that I made a really bad font, part because of my “newbieness” and little time to actually make the font. This past made me really like things that are visual and with coded interactions, and in my little world, I never had even imagined that fonts could be awesome for that, until a few day ago when watching a talk the gay told about dynamic fonts, that shrinks at the end edge of the page or even self-censorships. Pretty impressive to me, so this turns into an exhausting search for a font demo and some tutorials but I fail. Hope that you know something about it.

 
Thanks for all the help, and sorry my bag English, is my second language and hadn't mastered it yet.

Stephen Coles

Hi Thales. I moved your topic to the “Type Design: Technique and Theory” category and clarified your title. I assume you are referring to what are commonly known as “responsive fonts”? These are mostly conceptual at the moment, but the idea is that type could respond to the browser window size or other variables.

The talk you saw might have been Erik van Blokland at Typographics. He showed examples of responsive lettering, not type, but the principles could be used in fonts as well.

Thales Teodoro

Thanks for the help! I'm not sure if are responsive fonts .. the guy who did the talk is a member of a research group, and he said that it exist since 1999. But I'll look in depth these links

Cristóbal Henestrosa

1999? I guess you are talking about OpenType fonts.

Andrew Johnson

Thales,

Maybe what you're thinking about was Adobe's Multiple Master or Apple's GX format? We're currently trying to figure out responsive fonts at the moment. Possibly some of the work from the MIT Media Lab?

In addition to Erik Van Blokland's work, there's also some newer articles on the subject (http://alistapart.com/blog/post/variable-fonts-for-responsive-design, http://alistapart.com/article/live-font-interpolation-on-the-web and http://kupferschrift.de/cms/2012/05/responsive-typography/).

- A

Thales Teodoro

I think that's possible ... this is the talk https://youtu.be/0EDGH0m8wWc?t=39m21s but it is in Portuguese and unfortunately has no subtitles.

Amazing work on MIT. Tanks

Thales Teodoro

Hey guys I found one of the examples: (http://projectseen.com/). So now I understand the principle, but at the same time the second example seems a bit more complex to be made only in the font archive, ‘cos font size and orientation should change with an extern factor that is window size.