11 ms·

A parametric version of the Spectral font

238 points by tbassetto 9y ago

nayuki 9y ago
This concept of a parametric font is the modern-day reincarnation of Donald Knuth's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont .
- amyjess 9y ago
  There's also some of Adobe's Multiple Master fonts in there, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts
  - basch 9y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20010104101800/webcom.net/~nfhome/fontgen.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20010104101800/webcom.net/~nfhom...
  - a_e_k 9y ago
    And OpenType Variable Fonts: https://medium.com/@tiro/https-medium-com-tiro-introducing-opentype-variable-fonts-12ba6cd2369 https://medium.com/@tiro/https-medium-com-tiro-introducing-o...
svat 9y ago
Parametric fonts are cool. I think it's a stretch to say things like "Opening up to a new era of type design" though. Yes, the feature of "variable fonts" was added to the OpenType specification somewhat recently, in September 2016. But before that there was Adobe's "multiple master fonts", and even before that, there was Knuth's METAFONT, something that could have been a truly "new era of type design" but never took off. See http://www.metaflop.com/modulator http://www.metaflop.com/modulator for an example of parametric fonts, inspired by Knuth's system: you can drag the sliders to adjust various font parameters, and get many different fonts. Knuth's article The Concept of a Meta-Font [1], published in Visible Language, is a classic. As you read the article he plays various tricks with the fonts as he describes them; it's a delightful read. (His followup article "Lessons learned from Metafont" [2] is also interesting.) Unfortunately METAFONT as envisioned by Knuth never gained much adoption by other font designers, for (AFAICT) two reasons: 1. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a response [3] pointing out that it is not possible to mechanize all typefaces into a single one, which although a valid point (the article is great), attacks a straw man, arguing against an absurd claim that Knuth never even suggested IMO. So some may have got the wrong impression from it. 2. More importantly, as Richard Southall or Chuck Bigelow (I forget who) said, most type designers think with shapes; they don't think about shapes. Only a mind like Knuth's would prefer to think deeply about the shape of each letter and come up with symbolic descriptions of each, parametrized across the whole family (see Knuth's article The letter S [4] on his struggles with doing this for just one character). Knuth has often said that we understand things better when we can teach them to a computer, and I still have hope for a future with parametric fonts that are better "understood": not because the shapes will be better, but simply because humanity will be better off with a deeper understanding of letterforms. But I think that whatever the technology, the task of parametrizing shapes will run into similar challenges, some of which were described in the above-mentioned articles and say Richard Southall's Designing New Typefaces with Metafont [5]. [1]: http://www.zigzaganimal.be/elements/the-concept-of-metafont.pdf http://www.zigzaganimal.be/elements/the-concept-of-metafont.... [2]: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/19.1/lessons-learned-from-metafont.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/19.1/... [3]: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.4/meta-font-metamathematics-and-metaphysics-comments-on-donald-knuths-article-161.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.4/... / https://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR136.pdf https://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR136.pdf [4]: http://www.cnd.mcgill.ca/~ivan/Papers/The%20letter%20S.pdf http://www.cnd.mcgill.ca/~ivan/Papers/The%20letter%20S.pdf [5]: http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1074/CS-TR-85-1074.pdf http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1074/CS-TR-8...
- tribby 9y ago
  > Parametric fonts are cool. I think it's a stretch to say things like "Opening up to a new era of type design" though. Yes, the feature of "variable fonts" was added to the OpenType specification somewhat recently, in September 2016. But before that there was Adobe's "multiple master fonts", and even before that, there was Knuth's METAFONT, something that could have been a truly "new era of type design" but never took off. I think the reason it's a stretch to say "opening up to a new era of type design" has less to do with the tech itself, and more the lack of implementation/support. variable fonts seem promising because they were a joint effort by apple, microsoft, google, and adobe (i.e. the major browser vendors plus the major design software vendor), but it won't be a new era until we can finally use these things. when arbitrary axes for interpolation are well supported in CSS using something like a GX font file, and when they're supported in adobe photoshop, indesign etc, I think that will be the point when we can adopt the tech, and when the "new era" can really begin.
- jandrese 9y ago
  I thought the problem was that font designers didn't like creating their font in a text editor. The whole system seemed to be designed to cater to users who were both computer programmers and typographic artists. That's a demographic set that may consist of a single member: Donald Knuth.
  - svat 9y ago
    Yes I agree, to a first approximation that's true. Dave Crossland (another computer programmer who works with typography) has said similar stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwPObPbk90I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwPObPbk90I, http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/24/why-metafont-didnt-catch-on/ http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/24/why-metafont-didn..., https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb29-3/tb93crossland.pdf https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb29-3/tb93crossland.pdf, https://speakerdeck.com/davelab6/anrt-2016-why-didnt-metafont-catch-on https://speakerdeck.com/davelab6/anrt-2016-why-didnt-metafon... This is related to the "thinking with shapes" versus "thinking about shapes" comment. But looking more closely, there were a few people who made fonts with Metafont: Georgia Tobin, Neenie Billawala etc. made a few, as did a lot of people working with non-Latin scripts: e.g. Frans Velthuis and Charles Wikner made really nice Devanagari fonts. (See "The Many Faces of TeX" for Metafont-fonts as of 1988: https://www.tug.org/tugboat/tb09-2/tb21wujastyk.pdf https://www.tug.org/tugboat/tb09-2/tb21wujastyk.pdf -- that was probably their peak though.) Still you're right, no "mainstream" type designers switched over.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
It looks really, really bad at my browser's current size: http://i.imgur.com/ZvyLwjB.png http://i.imgur.com/ZvyLwjB.png http://i.imgur.com/LC9cive.png http://i.imgur.com/LC9cive.png
- ericfrederich 9y ago
  It's also cut off at 2560x1440 on a Chrome web browser. Dunno how anybody can get excited about a font by Google that even Google can't figure out how to layout properly in a Google browser.
  - Gigablah 9y ago
    It wasn't made by Google... it's only hosted on Google fonts.
- rossy 9y ago
  Same here. Kind of ironic that 'user experience' is the only text that was cut off when I loaded the page. https://0x0.st/lRi.png https://0x0.st/lRi.png
placeybordeaux 9y ago
The constantly changing box is almost impossible to read.
- pc86 9y ago
  It's a good thing you would never do that for text you wanted someone to read, and would only do it to show what you can do with the font.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    You would never do that. You probably wouldn't commit any of the other extremely common typographical/design sins out there either, and yet the web is awash in ugly design.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
Wow, this could be so GeoCities. Remember that a proportionately small, but numerically large, number of people really like blinking text. :-)
- cat199 9y ago
  Teh feutur iz now http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=1&music=4&url=https://spectral.prototypo.io/ http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=...
alikoneko 9y ago
I really hope this doesn't become popular like Lato and Montserrat. This is horrible to me as a dyslexic. It's near unreadable and distracting with the constant size changes.
- forgot-my-pw 9y ago
  I think the purpose is so people can create their own variations of the available fonts, not to make animated text.
  - alikoneko 9y ago
    I really hope so. The web will be an unusable mess to me if fonts change size on scroll like in their demo page.
    - eyelidlessness 9y ago
      They're just demoing the parameters you can adjust to build a font. I assume they built the demo the way they did because it's more approachable for most than a long list of sliders with names that might not be meaningful to a lot of people. That said, the way it works would certainly be off-putting to some. You may find their actual font builder app provides a better experience: https://app.prototypo.io/ https://app.prototypo.io/
throwasehasdwi 9y ago
What a wonderful way to add massive complexity to font rendering while delivering spectacularly little value. Don't get me wrong, it's cool, I just don't see the point. And I don't look forward to my battery life being used for pointless sugar.
- SippinLean 9y ago
  Wow, what a cynical viewpoint for a very cool, useful technology that we've been begging for for quite a while. Maybe you're confusing the demo with practical applications, but this is a demo.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wldcordeiro 9y ago
    It's a shame such a negative, snarky comment got so many upvotes. You could express disinterest in this parametric font stuff without doing it in such a nasty way.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      On the other hand, it allows for a clear, concise counterpoint to be upvoted and seen fairly quickly by those that shared that view, so they may see something to change their mind prior to expressing similar views. Edit: To clarify, a counterpoint to the initial negative comment...
- biocomputation 9y ago
  I also wasn't that impressed by the fact that I had to wait a few seconds for it to work. A font demo -especially a parametric font demo- really should be instant.
- svat 9y ago
  Best not to confuse this demo of their parametric font, with the idea of parametric fonts in the first place. This page tries to vary the font as you scroll etc., which is just a (suboptimal) way of interactively demonstrating the font parameters, but not the point. For a better demo (that does not use the same tech), see http://www.metaflop.com/modulator http://www.metaflop.com/modulator -- you vary the parameters, then a fixed font is generated that you can download and use. (I mentioned this in another comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14604890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14604890) As for the value: the entire Computer Modern family of typefaces (used in TeX/LaTeX and friends) was generated with METAFONT which embodies the idea of font generation through "pens, programs, and parameters" -- the regular, bold, italic (even typewriter) variants of the font, and at various point sizes, are generated from common font definitions. Similarly the shapes of the loops in say p and d, etc. This ensures consistency and lets you experiment. (Though to be honest, very few people have successfully designed good font families with this approach.) The articles that I mentioned in the other comment are better at seeing what's the point.
Yhippa 9y ago
...is this a good thing? It seems so? Being able to fine-tune your fonts seems like it's better than using something static.
yladiz 9y ago
What's the usefulness of this? Part of the reason I ask is because while I would trust a UI designer to design the layout, colors, for an application, I think font design isn't as simple because there's a lot of factors that go into it, in some ways scientific and some ways artistic. I wouldn't trust someone who isn't trained in font/typeface design to use a tool like this. Also: On Safari, this took maybe 5-8 seconds to load, and bogged down the entire browser for that time. Afterwards it took a lot of power to render something else on the page. For something that is only showcasing a font demo to take up that much power is pretty crazy.
- phlakaton 9y ago
  Generally: it's a way to tweak a font family for use in a specific design context. Obvious parameters would be weight and width, but others could be imagined as well. In the case of Prototypo, it looks like you tweak things upstream, and then generate concrete font files for each variant you want; those are what you then use in your project. This still has the downside though of having to distribute multiple fonts, though, even if they're related. Looking into the future, I wonder if it will ever make sense to push that downstream, and distribute one parametric font to clients. You could then use some styling language on the client end to have the client render the variants you want...
- jandrese 9y ago
  I was thinking it might make more sense to design your font and then bake it into something normal for the browser. On the other hand, I can't imagine seeing myself going "I need something with the Times New Roman curvature, but thicker serifs..."
db48x 9y ago
I guess they haven't heard of METAFONT.
fnovd 9y ago
Very cool. I'm seeing a future where fonts are stored as a series of transformations rather than a bunch of bitmaps/glyphs/vectors. A client could have specifications for adapting any font to make it more readable for their particular set of eyes while letting the font maintain a unique "look".
- eyelidlessness 9y ago
  The vast majority of fonts are not stored as bitmaps. Most font formats store glyphs as vectors with a variety of additional information for pixel hinting, ligatures and probably a handful of other details that I can't even think of off the top of my head.
  - phlakaton 9y ago
    Right. They're even parameterized, in a sense, but pretty much the only parameter available on the client side is size, right? (Unless I misunderstand how boldface is applied these days.)
    - eyelidlessness 9y ago
      I think Prototypo demonstrates the parameterization is possible, but typically (for now) font weights are distinct fonts. Sometimes boldness or italics can be naively faked, but it's usually not pretty.
      - phlakaton 9y ago
        Right – I meant even traditional fonts could be seen as "parameterized" if you were squinting at them through a slightly foggy lens. :-)
- platinumrad 9y ago
  Aside from, well, bitmap fonts, fonts aren't stored as bitmaps...
nimish 9y ago
Iosevka is also parametric, but fixed for a given TTF, as far as I can tell. Very nice for coding. https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y ago
  Parametric fonts go back to at least metafont. Pretty sure you can do all the transformations indicated on the page in 'native' metafont.
  - theoh 9y ago
    The involvement of Metafont with parametric design doesn't necessarily mean that it's a sound typographic principle. As others have mentioned, professional font design is a business of total perfectionism and particularity: you can't really parameterize a font family in a totally satisfactory way (and italic is not in general just an oblique transformation of the standard characters). This parametric approach is most likely to work if used with a "curve-fitting" mentality to approximate and interpolate sets of hand-tuned characters, rather than a methodology that aims to describe the essence of a character parametrically (as is routine in architectural parametric design).
    - Ericson2314 9y ago
      This is like arguing linguistics is invalid because language is art.
      - theoh 9y ago
        Trust me, reducing a typeface family to a parametric formula with continuous and valid/beautiful transitions between the various fonts, let alone weights, requires superhuman intelligence and effort. I'm claiming that the scope of parameterized fonts is limited, in an analogous way to linguistics not trying to explain poetry.
- lwlml 9y ago
anigbrowl 9y ago
Imagine shop windows that react according to the movements of passers-by I would prefer not to.
- Mindless2112 9y ago
  Not font related, but I'm imagining this -- http://hackaday.com/2010/10/15/window-curtain-moves-to-screen-pedestrians/ http://hackaday.com/2010/10/15/window-curtain-moves-to-scree...
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    I have to admit this is oddly delightful
smlacy 9y ago
A system and method for letting "The Marketing Guy" choose and design the font instead of a trained graphic designer. This isn't going to end well. Have you ever seen a font and thought "oh, that's ugly" but it's really hard to put into words exactly why? Font design is all about aesthetics and custom hand-tweaking every single curve of every single letter and making them look exactly right.
- SippinLean 9y ago
  Presumably the designer is setting the constraints. That's already a problem, modern typefaces will have 10+ weights, with 5+ variations within each weight, 50+ fonts in total. It's quite easy for The Marketing Guy to make an ugly layout with those options, but for a skilled craftsman having that many options lets them fine tune a design. Same here.
- dagw 9y ago
  The Marketing Guy already has access to hundreds of fonts with thousands of variations, I fail to see how this will make a difference.
- 0x4a42 9y ago
  The marketing guy use Comic Sans.
a_imho 9y ago
Does not load for me, CORS request failed
joefkelley 9y ago
I think the serif width / serif height axes are switched
lwlml 9y ago
Page explodes for me into an unhappy tab, on OpenBSD/Chrome at least.
derfnugget 9y ago
Pre-link-click: Ooo another site by Google these are usually pretty cool; at least they're well made... First impression: LOL this site was made by Google?! Page load is atrocious. Interaction using mobile is very bad. Lasting impression: This is like some weird developer designer hybrid that encourages...I don't even know...Extra....Weird...serifs
- DannyBee 9y ago
  I'm just about 100% positive at this point that Google had nothing to do with this. I can't find anything internally that makes me believe we did (and i've looked really hard)
peterburkimsher 9y ago
I'm collecting Chinese fonts for a project for a deep learning course. Is there a tool where I can generate TTFs with different parameters to change the whole Unicode character set, not just ASCII?
- rspeer 9y ago
  The number of fonts that cover the whole Unicode character set is zero, as the Unicode character set grows faster than fonts are designed for obscure scripts. The fonts that come closest are Google's Noto Sans (an Android-esque font that covers every script that's realistically in use), GNU Unifont (a monospaced raster font, great for multilingual coding), and Arial (bringing standardized mediocrity to the whole world). These projects put a lot of work into finding one visual style that works across many different scripts. I doubt you will find anything that works with a parameterized range of visual styles across different scripts. However, if you narrow your scope to fonts that just cover Chinese characters, I believe I've seen some projects that parameterize how to draw the strokes. I doubt the output will be neatly packaged in a TTF file.
DannyBee 9y ago
Does this actually have anything to do with Google? From what i can tell, prototypo is a completely separate startup company with some per-month pricing plan If not, this looks like some bad trademark abuse, as everyone here seems to think this is somehow done by Google :(
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- vitus 9y ago
  As far as I can tell, Spectral is listed in Google Fonts: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Spectral https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Spectral Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be a connection.
  - dang 9y ago
    OK, we've changed the title above from "Spectral, the first parametric Google font".
JoshMnem 9y ago
The heavily animated demo is worrying. Animation is making the Web very unpleasant lately. It's extremely distracting when trying to consume text content. Please don't animate your fonts.
Aeolun 9y ago
This is a great example of a terrible website.
savolai 9y ago
This site doesn't load at all on Firefox on OS X for me. Loading your experience stays on indefinitely.
smnscu 9y ago
I've spent so much time playing with the parameters that now letters don't make any sense to me. edit: also it's absolutely gorgeous, well done

238 points by tbassetto 9y ago

This concept of a parametric font is the modern-day reincarnation of Donald Knuth's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont .

amyjess 9y ago
There's also some of Adobe's Multiple Master fonts in there, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts
- basch 9y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20010104101800/webcom.net/~nfhome/fontgen.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20010104101800/webcom.net/~nfhom...
- a_e_k 9y ago
  And OpenType Variable Fonts: https://medium.com/@tiro/https-medium-com-tiro-introducing-opentype-variable-fonts-12ba6cd2369 https://medium.com/@tiro/https-medium-com-tiro-introducing-o...

svat 9y ago

Parametric fonts are cool. I think it's a stretch to say things like "Opening up to a new era of type design" though. Yes, the feature of "variable fonts" was added to the OpenType specification somewhat recently, in September 2016. But before that there was Adobe's "multiple master fonts", and even before that, there was Knuth's METAFONT, something that could have been a truly "new era of type design" but never took off. See http://www.metaflop.com/modulator http://www.metaflop.com/modulator for an example of parametric fonts, inspired by Knuth's system: you can drag the sliders to adjust various font parameters, and get many different fonts. Knuth's article The Concept of a Meta-Font [1], published in Visible Language, is a classic. As you read the article he plays various tricks with the fonts as he describes them; it's a delightful read. (His followup article "Lessons learned from Metafont" [2] is also interesting.) Unfortunately METAFONT as envisioned by Knuth never gained much adoption by other font designers, for (AFAICT) two reasons: 1. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a response [3] pointing out that it is not possible to mechanize all typefaces into a single one, which although a valid point (the article is great), attacks a straw man, arguing against an absurd claim that Knuth never even suggested IMO. So some may have got the wrong impression from it. 2. More importantly, as Richard Southall or Chuck Bigelow (I forget who) said, most type designers think with shapes; they don't think about shapes. Only a mind like Knuth's would prefer to think deeply about the shape of each letter and come up with symbolic descriptions of each, parametrized across the whole family (see Knuth's article The letter S [4] on his struggles with doing this for just one character). Knuth has often said that we understand things better when we can teach them to a computer, and I still have hope for a future with parametric fonts that are better "understood": not because the shapes will be better, but simply because humanity will be better off with a deeper understanding of letterforms. But I think that whatever the technology, the task of parametrizing shapes will run into similar challenges, some of which were described in the above-mentioned articles and say Richard Southall's Designing New Typefaces with Metafont [5]. [1]: http://www.zigzaganimal.be/elements/the-concept-of-metafont.pdf http://www.zigzaganimal.be/elements/the-concept-of-metafont.... [2]: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/19.1/lessons-learned-from-metafont.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/19.1/... [3]: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.4/meta-font-metamathematics-and-metaphysics-comments-on-donald-knuths-article-161.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.4/... / https://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR136.pdf https://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR136.pdf [4]: http://www.cnd.mcgill.ca/~ivan/Papers/The%20letter%20S.pdf http://www.cnd.mcgill.ca/~ivan/Papers/The%20letter%20S.pdf [5]: http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1074/CS-TR-85-1074.pdf http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1074/CS-TR-8...

tribby 9y ago
> Parametric fonts are cool. I think it's a stretch to say things like "Opening up to a new era of type design" though. Yes, the feature of "variable fonts" was added to the OpenType specification somewhat recently, in September 2016. But before that there was Adobe's "multiple master fonts", and even before that, there was Knuth's METAFONT, something that could have been a truly "new era of type design" but never took off. I think the reason it's a stretch to say "opening up to a new era of type design" has less to do with the tech itself, and more the lack of implementation/support. variable fonts seem promising because they were a joint effort by apple, microsoft, google, and adobe (i.e. the major browser vendors plus the major design software vendor), but it won't be a new era until we can finally use these things. when arbitrary axes for interpolation are well supported in CSS using something like a GX font file, and when they're supported in adobe photoshop, indesign etc, I think that will be the point when we can adopt the tech, and when the "new era" can really begin.
jandrese 9y ago
I thought the problem was that font designers didn't like creating their font in a text editor. The whole system seemed to be designed to cater to users who were both computer programmers and typographic artists. That's a demographic set that may consist of a single member: Donald Knuth.
- svat 9y ago
  Yes I agree, to a first approximation that's true. Dave Crossland (another computer programmer who works with typography) has said similar stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwPObPbk90I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwPObPbk90I, http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/24/why-metafont-didnt-catch-on/ http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/24/why-metafont-didn..., https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb29-3/tb93crossland.pdf https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb29-3/tb93crossland.pdf, https://speakerdeck.com/davelab6/anrt-2016-why-didnt-metafont-catch-on https://speakerdeck.com/davelab6/anrt-2016-why-didnt-metafon... This is related to the "thinking with shapes" versus "thinking about shapes" comment. But looking more closely, there were a few people who made fonts with Metafont: Georgia Tobin, Neenie Billawala etc. made a few, as did a lot of people working with non-Latin scripts: e.g. Frans Velthuis and Charles Wikner made really nice Devanagari fonts. (See "The Many Faces of TeX" for Metafont-fonts as of 1988: https://www.tug.org/tugboat/tb09-2/tb21wujastyk.pdf https://www.tug.org/tugboat/tb09-2/tb21wujastyk.pdf -- that was probably their peak though.) Still you're right, no "mainstream" type designers switched over.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

It looks really, really bad at my browser's current size: http://i.imgur.com/ZvyLwjB.png http://i.imgur.com/ZvyLwjB.png http://i.imgur.com/LC9cive.png http://i.imgur.com/LC9cive.png

ericfrederich 9y ago
It's also cut off at 2560x1440 on a Chrome web browser. Dunno how anybody can get excited about a font by Google that even Google can't figure out how to layout properly in a Google browser.
- Gigablah 9y ago
  It wasn't made by Google... it's only hosted on Google fonts.
rossy 9y ago
Same here. Kind of ironic that 'user experience' is the only text that was cut off when I loaded the page. https://0x0.st/lRi.png https://0x0.st/lRi.png

placeybordeaux 9y ago

The constantly changing box is almost impossible to read.

pc86 9y ago
It's a good thing you would never do that for text you wanted someone to read, and would only do it to show what you can do with the font.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  You would never do that. You probably wouldn't commit any of the other extremely common typographical/design sins out there either, and yet the web is awash in ugly design.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

Wow, this could be so GeoCities. Remember that a proportionately small, but numerically large, number of people really like blinking text. :-)

cat199 9y ago
Teh feutur iz now http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=1&music=4&url=https://spectral.prototypo.io/ http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=...

alikoneko 9y ago

I really hope this doesn't become popular like Lato and Montserrat. This is horrible to me as a dyslexic. It's near unreadable and distracting with the constant size changes.

forgot-my-pw 9y ago
I think the purpose is so people can create their own variations of the available fonts, not to make animated text.
- alikoneko 9y ago
  I really hope so. The web will be an unusable mess to me if fonts change size on scroll like in their demo page.
  - eyelidlessness 9y ago
    They're just demoing the parameters you can adjust to build a font. I assume they built the demo the way they did because it's more approachable for most than a long list of sliders with names that might not be meaningful to a lot of people. That said, the way it works would certainly be off-putting to some. You may find their actual font builder app provides a better experience: https://app.prototypo.io/ https://app.prototypo.io/

throwasehasdwi 9y ago

What a wonderful way to add massive complexity to font rendering while delivering spectacularly little value. Don't get me wrong, it's cool, I just don't see the point. And I don't look forward to my battery life being used for pointless sugar.

SippinLean 9y ago
Wow, what a cynical viewpoint for a very cool, useful technology that we've been begging for for quite a while. Maybe you're confusing the demo with practical applications, but this is a demo.
- deleted 9y ago
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- wldcordeiro 9y ago
  It's a shame such a negative, snarky comment got so many upvotes. You could express disinterest in this parametric font stuff without doing it in such a nasty way.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    On the other hand, it allows for a clear, concise counterpoint to be upvoted and seen fairly quickly by those that shared that view, so they may see something to change their mind prior to expressing similar views. Edit: To clarify, a counterpoint to the initial negative comment...
biocomputation 9y ago
I also wasn't that impressed by the fact that I had to wait a few seconds for it to work. A font demo -especially a parametric font demo- really should be instant.
svat 9y ago
Best not to confuse this demo of their parametric font, with the idea of parametric fonts in the first place. This page tries to vary the font as you scroll etc., which is just a (suboptimal) way of interactively demonstrating the font parameters, but not the point. For a better demo (that does not use the same tech), see http://www.metaflop.com/modulator http://www.metaflop.com/modulator -- you vary the parameters, then a fixed font is generated that you can download and use. (I mentioned this in another comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14604890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14604890) As for the value: the entire Computer Modern family of typefaces (used in TeX/LaTeX and friends) was generated with METAFONT which embodies the idea of font generation through "pens, programs, and parameters" -- the regular, bold, italic (even typewriter) variants of the font, and at various point sizes, are generated from common font definitions. Similarly the shapes of the loops in say p and d, etc. This ensures consistency and lets you experiment. (Though to be honest, very few people have successfully designed good font families with this approach.) The articles that I mentioned in the other comment are better at seeing what's the point.

Yhippa 9y ago

...is this a good thing? It seems so? Being able to fine-tune your fonts seems like it's better than using something static.

yladiz 9y ago

What's the usefulness of this? Part of the reason I ask is because while I would trust a UI designer to design the layout, colors, for an application, I think font design isn't as simple because there's a lot of factors that go into it, in some ways scientific and some ways artistic. I wouldn't trust someone who isn't trained in font/typeface design to use a tool like this. Also: On Safari, this took maybe 5-8 seconds to load, and bogged down the entire browser for that time. Afterwards it took a lot of power to render something else on the page. For something that is only showcasing a font demo to take up that much power is pretty crazy.

phlakaton 9y ago
Generally: it's a way to tweak a font family for use in a specific design context. Obvious parameters would be weight and width, but others could be imagined as well. In the case of Prototypo, it looks like you tweak things upstream, and then generate concrete font files for each variant you want; those are what you then use in your project. This still has the downside though of having to distribute multiple fonts, though, even if they're related. Looking into the future, I wonder if it will ever make sense to push that downstream, and distribute one parametric font to clients. You could then use some styling language on the client end to have the client render the variants you want...
jandrese 9y ago
I was thinking it might make more sense to design your font and then bake it into something normal for the browser. On the other hand, I can't imagine seeing myself going "I need something with the Times New Roman curvature, but thicker serifs..."

db48x 9y ago

I guess they haven't heard of METAFONT.

fnovd 9y ago

Very cool. I'm seeing a future where fonts are stored as a series of transformations rather than a bunch of bitmaps/glyphs/vectors. A client could have specifications for adapting any font to make it more readable for their particular set of eyes while letting the font maintain a unique "look".

eyelidlessness 9y ago
The vast majority of fonts are not stored as bitmaps. Most font formats store glyphs as vectors with a variety of additional information for pixel hinting, ligatures and probably a handful of other details that I can't even think of off the top of my head.
- phlakaton 9y ago
  Right. They're even parameterized, in a sense, but pretty much the only parameter available on the client side is size, right? (Unless I misunderstand how boldface is applied these days.)
  - eyelidlessness 9y ago
    I think Prototypo demonstrates the parameterization is possible, but typically (for now) font weights are distinct fonts. Sometimes boldness or italics can be naively faked, but it's usually not pretty.
    - phlakaton 9y ago
      Right – I meant even traditional fonts could be seen as "parameterized" if you were squinting at them through a slightly foggy lens. :-)
platinumrad 9y ago
Aside from, well, bitmap fonts, fonts aren't stored as bitmaps...

nimish 9y ago

Iosevka is also parametric, but fixed for a given TTF, as far as I can tell. Very nice for coding. https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y ago
Parametric fonts go back to at least metafont. Pretty sure you can do all the transformations indicated on the page in 'native' metafont.
- theoh 9y ago
  The involvement of Metafont with parametric design doesn't necessarily mean that it's a sound typographic principle. As others have mentioned, professional font design is a business of total perfectionism and particularity: you can't really parameterize a font family in a totally satisfactory way (and italic is not in general just an oblique transformation of the standard characters). This parametric approach is most likely to work if used with a "curve-fitting" mentality to approximate and interpolate sets of hand-tuned characters, rather than a methodology that aims to describe the essence of a character parametrically (as is routine in architectural parametric design).
  - Ericson2314 9y ago
    This is like arguing linguistics is invalid because language is art.
    - theoh 9y ago
      Trust me, reducing a typeface family to a parametric formula with continuous and valid/beautiful transitions between the various fonts, let alone weights, requires superhuman intelligence and effort. I'm claiming that the scope of parameterized fonts is limited, in an analogous way to linguistics not trying to explain poetry.
lwlml 9y ago

anigbrowl 9y ago

Imagine shop windows that react according to the movements of passers-by I would prefer not to.

Mindless2112 9y ago
Not font related, but I'm imagining this -- http://hackaday.com/2010/10/15/window-curtain-moves-to-screen-pedestrians/ http://hackaday.com/2010/10/15/window-curtain-moves-to-scree...
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I have to admit this is oddly delightful

smlacy 9y ago

A system and method for letting "The Marketing Guy" choose and design the font instead of a trained graphic designer. This isn't going to end well. Have you ever seen a font and thought "oh, that's ugly" but it's really hard to put into words exactly why? Font design is all about aesthetics and custom hand-tweaking every single curve of every single letter and making them look exactly right.

SippinLean 9y ago
Presumably the designer is setting the constraints. That's already a problem, modern typefaces will have 10+ weights, with 5+ variations within each weight, 50+ fonts in total. It's quite easy for The Marketing Guy to make an ugly layout with those options, but for a skilled craftsman having that many options lets them fine tune a design. Same here.
dagw 9y ago
The Marketing Guy already has access to hundreds of fonts with thousands of variations, I fail to see how this will make a difference.
0x4a42 9y ago
The marketing guy use Comic Sans.

a_imho 9y ago

Does not load for me, CORS request failed

joefkelley 9y ago

I think the serif width / serif height axes are switched

lwlml 9y ago

Page explodes for me into an unhappy tab, on OpenBSD/Chrome at least.

derfnugget 9y ago

Pre-link-click: Ooo another site by Google these are usually pretty cool; at least they're well made... First impression: LOL this site was made by Google?! Page load is atrocious. Interaction using mobile is very bad. Lasting impression: This is like some weird developer designer hybrid that encourages...I don't even know...Extra....Weird...serifs

DannyBee 9y ago
I'm just about 100% positive at this point that Google had nothing to do with this. I can't find anything internally that makes me believe we did (and i've looked really hard)

peterburkimsher 9y ago

I'm collecting Chinese fonts for a project for a deep learning course. Is there a tool where I can generate TTFs with different parameters to change the whole Unicode character set, not just ASCII?

rspeer 9y ago
The number of fonts that cover the whole Unicode character set is zero, as the Unicode character set grows faster than fonts are designed for obscure scripts. The fonts that come closest are Google's Noto Sans (an Android-esque font that covers every script that's realistically in use), GNU Unifont (a monospaced raster font, great for multilingual coding), and Arial (bringing standardized mediocrity to the whole world). These projects put a lot of work into finding one visual style that works across many different scripts. I doubt you will find anything that works with a parameterized range of visual styles across different scripts. However, if you narrow your scope to fonts that just cover Chinese characters, I believe I've seen some projects that parameterize how to draw the strokes. I doubt the output will be neatly packaged in a TTF file.

DannyBee 9y ago

Does this actually have anything to do with Google? From what i can tell, prototypo is a completely separate startup company with some per-month pricing plan If not, this looks like some bad trademark abuse, as everyone here seems to think this is somehow done by Google :(

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vitus 9y ago
As far as I can tell, Spectral is listed in Google Fonts: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Spectral https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Spectral Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be a connection.
- dang 9y ago
  OK, we've changed the title above from "Spectral, the first parametric Google font".

JoshMnem 9y ago

The heavily animated demo is worrying. Animation is making the Web very unpleasant lately. It's extremely distracting when trying to consume text content. Please don't animate your fonts.

Aeolun 9y ago

This is a great example of a terrible website.

savolai 9y ago

This site doesn't load at all on Firefox on OS X for me. Loading your experience stays on indefinitely.

smnscu 9y ago

I've spent so much time playing with the parameters that now letters don't make any sense to me. edit: also it's absolutely gorgeous, well done