« LA IDUG: Variable Fonts, Color Fonts & FontLab

August 23, 2018

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I will be presenting to the Los Angeles InDesign User Group (IDUG) on September 20, 2018 in Van Nuys, CA, for their 13th anniversary meeting! Come see the cool and even sometimes amazing things being done with variable fonts, as well as a bit on color fonts and how fonts are made.

Be entertained and enlightened with the joys of variable fonts and color fonts in InDesign and friends. This demo night unlocks the secrets of OpenType variations, aka variable fonts and color fonts. Learn how they work, how you use them, and why they work the way they do. Bonus: some pointers on font creation and font editing.

You will learn:

Font Creation and Editing:

How fonts are made and modified
Font drawing compared to Adobe Illustrator
OpenType features are easy
Variations and color
Highlights of FontLab VI

Color Fonts:

The four different color font formats and where they each work
What they can and can’t do
The secret of the color fonts (cluster bleep) and its impact
How Adobe made the best color font bet
What it means that InDesign color font support is a “Tech Preview” feature
How color fonts work in InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop today

Variable Fonts:

How they work in Illustrator and Photoshop today (we hope in InDesign “real soon now”)
Origins of variable fonts (older than you think!)
Previewing variable fonts: Axis-Praxis, FontView, etc.
Standard axes: weight, width, optical size and others
Common other axes: optical size and animations
Great uses of variations
Weird, wacky and wonderful uses, too
Resources: more info, free fonts, and others