Think of the last time you enjoyed browsing an excellent magazine. This means that the typography of print media is often rich and sophisticated, so that the reading experience is truly delightful. But they can use as many typeface styles as they like. When a designer creates a print project they face some constraints, such as the physical size of the page layout, the number of colors they can use (which is determined by the kind of printing press that will be used), and so on. Challenges for the designer and developer # Left: a specimen of the Roboto typeface family. With variable fonts, all styles can be contained in a single file. A style is a single and specific typeface, such as Bold Italic, and a family is the complete set of styles.īefore variable fonts, each style was implemented as a separate font file. In other words, a typeface is what you see, and the font is what you use.Īnother concept that is often overlooked is the distinction between a style, and a family. However there is a difference: A typeface is the underlying visual design that can exist in many different typesetting technologies, and a font is one of these implementations, in a digital file format. The terms font and typeface are often used interchangeably by developers. See Can I use variable fonts? and Fallbacks. Browser compatibility #Īs of May 2020 variable fonts are supported in most browsers. First, let's review how typography works on the web, and what innovations variable fonts bring. In this article, we will look at what variable fonts are, the benefits they offer, and how we can use them in our work. Challenges for the designer and developer.

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