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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
by 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 agoGenerally: 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 agoI 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..."