Optical sizes for icon fonts for the web

Vasil Stanev
Vasil Stanev Posts: 788
in Type Business
Currently it dawned on me that icon fonts can be made to have optical sizes to help UX with desktop webpage resizing and mobile. There seems to be a Google font just for that but beyond that I couldn't find others (nor did I search tooo hard lol :) ) Has someone here done such a type of font, are there highly marketable, or not so much, or not at all? I am thinking mostly custom work for business clients that want things like their logo to be turned into a company font (I've done this, but only for a static font) + and added suite of icons for their in-house materials.

Comments

  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,129
    It is hard to know how marketable optical sizes for icon fonts might be, when Google’s Material Symbols is libre (open source). I have in fact done production on such a font... but that would be Google’s.

    Regarding Material Symbols, its 20 and 24 px sizes, at Regular/400 weight are grid-snapped (at 1.5 px and 2 px stroke weights, respectively). It goes to 48 px, at which optical size the Regular/400 stroke weight in the font is 3/4 that of the 24 px, which would be exactly 3 px. Mostly, that is grid-snapped as well.

    (Material Symbols also has a weight axis of 100–700, with the 200 & 300 weights being 1 and 1.5 px strokes at 24 px. Plus a grade axis, a continuous/animation-friendly Fill axis. Also three styles: regular/outlined, rounded and sharp.)

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