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Shop Sans is a typeface for curved text paths
- dylan604 11mo agois this for someone that doesn't have access to proper typesetting software? i guess that could be cool if along side the font size you have a radius entry for programs that do not have a type-on-path tool. i'm just spoiled and have the proper tools so this causes me to tilt my head and ask why
- tobr 11mo agoThis is about how each character adapts to the radius, not the path itself. Each character is tweaked so the design holds up as it’s curved. I don’t think you have tools to do that.
- CharlesW 11mo agoFWIW, people have glyph warping text (both on and off paths) using tools like Adobe Illustrator for as long as I can remember. I also don't quite get why one might want a capability that supports one type of glyph warping in the typeface itself.
- Luc 11mo agoA font is designed to have certain attributes (e.g. harmony between the letters). It is not clear that this harmony is preserved if you distort the font algorithmically. For this font the designer ensured that it is preserved.
- CharlesW 11mo agoI get that part (I've designed commercial typefaces), but as I understand it, (1) this only works for type on circles or circular arcs, and (2) the typeface has no awareness of the circle/segment it's on, so the designer still has to manually match the Curve property to the radius. I think this is really cool and interesting work by Nick Sherman. I just wonder if I'm correct about the limited applications, and what could be done to enable the kind of "contextual intelligence" that would enable fonts to better optimize themselves for a broader set of types of envelope deformations.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- tobr 11mo agoBecause it allows the effect of the curvature to be customized by hand for each letter shape by a skilled designer. Fonts like italics, bold or condensed can also be approximated with simple geometric operations, but I think you would agree that that looks terrible.
- bobbylarrybobby 11mo agoIt's not just about curving the baseline, the glyphs themselves curve according to the user-specified curve radius. Check out the second image/gif with curve optimizations on/off.
- ks2048 11mo agoWhat font features enable this? (curious how it is implemented and which software supports it)
- tshaddox 11mo agoFrom what I can tell, it's a variable font, where the font developer can declare an axis (in this case "curve," or more likely "CURV") and the font user can control the value of that axis (e.g. via CSS) which controls how the font renders itself. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Fonts/Variable_fonts#introducing_the_variation_axis https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Font... This site demonstrates many highly stylized and artistic variable font axes: https://www.axis-praxis.org/specimens/__DEFAULT__ https://www.axis-praxis.org/specimens/__DEFAULT__
- cellular 11mo agoI use a circular font I made in inkscape for outputting SVGs to GatorCAM for CNC. Inkscape lets me adjust kern of each letter because the curve can cause letters to touch.
- jasonjmcghee 11mo agoI'm out of the loop on pricing models for fonts, but is it normal to base it on number of visitors to your site?
- youngtaff 11mo agoDepends on the vendor… some also prevent things like subsetting or rely on methods for counting usage that slow down pages (Typekit)
- bobbylarrybobby 11mo agoYes
- thelogicguy 11mo agoThis is consistent with photo licensing, which is often scaled based on the potential number of viewers for both print and digital.
- lol768 11mo ago> This is consistent with photo licensing On the contrary, I would say this is increasingly unusual nowadays. There are print restrictions on e.g. iStock content, but there's no attempt to "ration" the number of visitors that see a stock photo at a specific price point. It's something that's generally put me off from licensing paid fonts - despite the work that has gone into them, because you're almost signing a blank cheque and it's not easy to know how many visitors are scraping content for LLMs.
- stronglikedan 11mo agoYes, and this pricing is quite reasonable too.
- LimeLimestone 11mo agoI'm even more outside the loop, what happens if on my personal blog I don't have any analytics and don't do any metering so I have no idea how many visitors I get?
- tobr 11mo agoHug of death, it seems. https://hex.xyz/news/2/ https://hex.xyz/news/2/ has some info about the font.
- TylerE 11mo agoThe definition of just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Giving me a migraine.
- Gualdrapo 11mo agoNot sure what you mean, and I'm not that versed in typography but as a graphic designer I'd bet people who actually know typography would appreciate something like this: laying out normal typefaces along a curve distort the space between letters and the top and bottom edges of letters won't follow the curvature they're being traced to until you do "manual" work (unless there's some auto-warping solution for fonts in something like Illustrator I am not aware of). Of course this is not meant for prose texts or something, but for logo design this is a great thing to have.
- Scribesley 11mo agoAnimated GIF from article shows what a "curve variable font" does: https://incremental-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/slide/image/35904/optimization.gif https://incremental-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/slid... Very cool
- stevage 11mo agoHmm I wonder how hard it would be to incorporate into maps. There's often a big problem laying out road labels legibly along windy roads.
- bhouston 11mo agoGoogle Maps, since it is WebGL-based, I think would not support these advanced font rendering features out of the box. Probably could be added?
- onion2k 11mo agoTroika text (a font-to-signed-distance-functions tool) can do a lot of the heavy lifting of using fonts in WebGL apps. It can also do the process of converting from font data to SDFs in glsl, so it's fast. No idea if it supports variable fonts these days though. https://github.com/protectwise/troika/tree/main/packages/troika-three-text https://github.com/protectwise/troika/tree/main/packages/tro...
- duderific 11mo agoBit of an aside but that site is truly awesome. Good to see some real design chops out there. I could browse those fonts for hours.
- bonyt 11mo agoI think your license has a typo that inverts the meaning: > This license does now allow for the fonts to be embedded in software apps or e-books.
- bofadeez 11mo agoSurprised this wasn't already a thing. What did people do before? Manually warp it?
- fainpul 11mo agoIf the curve radius is not too small, normal text with unaltered characters might look ok. Some vector graphics software allows you to deform objects to conform to a path. Text can easily be transformed to editable path objects. Example in Inkscape: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/103080/inkscape-bend-a-vector-along-a-circular-arc https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/103080/ink...
- drob518 11mo agoYea, that’s what I first thought. “Surely, designers encounter this situation all the time and they already do this!?!?” I guess not.
- npteljes 11mo agoCreate text in higher resolution, rasterize it, warp it would be my process, if I needed to curve the characters themselves too. In case I didn't, because the shape is not that small compared to the text, simply wrapping around the shape works. Usually there's a tool to create a path, and then text can go along that path, as if the path were its baseline.
- bhouston 11mo agoBeautiful.
- smurda 11mo agoThis curve variable is very cool! It will be interesting to see if this becomes a new standard integrated into other variable types.