Why don't we hear about more use of variable fonts on the Web?

If you do a Google search for “Which browsers support variable fonts?” you will find it difficult to determine which sites have the current information. That’s the dilemma faced by web designers who have to decide whether it’s worth subjecting their clients to complaints from users with older systems. Most will decide that it’s simply not worth it. A similar suspicion is held by those who wonder about support for some of the more exotic OT features. Type developers like to keep busy and some seem to have become addicted to complexity, but users of type reject the idea of the ground shifting under their feet. We like our type to be safe and dependable. At the moment, there’s just not enough to be gained by using variable fonts, promising though they may be. Many of those currently available (according to v-fonts.com) seem to be more interesting than useful, and many are sadly underdeveloped.

For print designers like me, who consider themselves to be serious typographers and who work with extended texts, variable fonts have the promise to bring back aspects of Multiple Master fonts that I found advantageous: a way to adjust optical sizes, weights, and widths to produce more harmonious designs. But there are now static font families that have size-specific variants that, if imperfect, are quite good enough. It’s been a real pleasure to see fonts that I admired and used in metal but avoided ever after, such as Futura or Walbaum, appear in recent new versions that perform well on the page in many sizes and weights, even if my idea of the “perfect” weight for a particular situation is almost, but not quite, there. 

Back in the mid-1990s, I made a very elaborate museum catalog using MM Minion throughout. As it was produced just before the advent of PDF print workflow, the files can no longer be retrieved, and even if they could be, they couldn't be edited. I’m loathe to take that chance again. I think Adobe made a major mistake by abandoning MM as a commercial product, if only because it discouraged people from taking chances. I do, however, understand their frustration when they found that many people who claimed to be interested and excited by MM proved to be too lazy to work with it. (I found it to be much easier than many claimed it to be.)

Shopping for fonts is like venturing into a category 5 hurricane, with debris flying all around as you search for a diamond. Adding the complication of variable fonts might just be more trouble than it’s worth, at least for now. Yet, I wouldn’t discourage anyone from making more of them, because eventually it might succeed. 

When compact audio disc players first became available in the early 1980s, the audiophiles with money to burn (the early players cost around $2000 = ±$5500 in today’s dollars) bought any disc they could get their hands on: train whistles, bird songs, Kenny G—anything. Not many players were sold at first. It wasn’t until the big labels started releasing their vast backlists of LP recordings in the new format did the whole thing take off, thereby driving down the cost of the player units. I’m thinking that a similar situation exists with VF fonts. 

If there were VF versions of the fonts I use and depend on, I’d buy them in a flash (my previously stated concerns notwithstanding). But that’s not what’s happening. What have been published so far (according to Nick Sherman’s site) are largely new fonts, with only rare exceptions. The world can barely absorb more new fonts in any format and professional designers, who are the target market for VF, want the fonts they already depend on before they consider new ones. Until the largest founders step up with VF versions of their most used types, I fear that the format will languish.