Anyone seen this yet? Adobe let's you 'create' a typeface within your project by adjusting width, stroke width, curvature, crossbar height, contrast, slant and a bunch of other things.
See it hereI posted this under the 'type design software', just because I didn't know which category would be best. It does actually create font files.
What do you guys think of this? From a software perspective they did a nice job, lots of stuff to adjust and lots of results too. But from a typeface design viewpoint it seems very limited.
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But in all seriousness, I'd love this for my six-year-old son. He'd have a blast.
As a type user, I do actually like the idea of having a "weight slider" of some kind, for when you want something in between existing weights. This is not that, but that's the first place my mind went.
It has happened in the field of web design, logo design, industrial design etc., but never negates the professional sector in the way people fear it could.
But I'll keep any more than that for another thread lol…
As long as Batman is not capable of typing his name properly, I refuse to take him seriously. Probably he uses a keyboard driver from the Joker.
At the same time, using something like this might actually be a quick & dirty way of trying how a different typeface might look, how it would influence your design, and the designers might choose to use an actual well-designed typeface that matches what they whopped up in the first place?
There's numerous cases where technology which was feared, mocked or seemed stupid, actually helped the industry instead of destroying it. I'm not saying I'm a fan though
Actually I do believe in parametrized type design, I only don’t believe in this approach. It looks simple because it overly simplifies the matter. It is also not a very original approach.
It can be used for display work and prototyping, perhaps by a client before calling in a type designer for a custom design.
Ultimately, typographers with balk at having to tinker with all the variables, and will instead choose a ready-made product. No matter how easy and slick it is to use, they will find that there is too much time required to be spent appraising a suitable balance between “competing” variables (that is the nature of design), and just opt for something off the shelf, with all the fine tuning done by a pro.
But I wonder about this project being more useful hooked up to a video app, rather than trying just to make headlines, or trim text with it. This stuff makes demos people cheer at.... Everywhere. I know, because I've been doing these kinds of demos for a while. People like the videos, why waste the technology just on print or still web stuff.
You can't say it's not a neat tool!
FWIW, Font Chameleon was much more sophisticated. It was possible to create fonts that looked like real fonts, and also do the crazy slider thing. It could do stuff like morph from one font to another. Multiple Masters was simpler, and based on interpolating between simple, compatible outlines.
Anyhoo, stagecraft aside, it’s a great idea... kind of a visual Metafont. Beats the hell out of the primitive and clumsy skeleton files I’ve been creating in FontForge, although “Expand Stroke” is more powerful in some ways.