Variable Font

Course

When we observe the changes of scenario in the multiple contexts of visual communication – from editorial design to branding, system design, corporate publishing to museum and space communication – the fact that the dynamic generation of images is a tool that provides competitiveness to the designers is evident.

Being able to apply the rules of parametric design to the generation of images guarantees designers greater workflow efficiency and, above all, an unprecedented breadth of expressive possibilities.

It is in this context that the potential offered by a technology such as variable fonts should be read.

A one-week workshop to design and develop a variable font.

With the recent introduction of the OpenType 1.8 format and Font Variations, the landscape of designing and using fonts has changed. If OpenType had already contributed to the integration of multiple writing systems into a single font and to the development of dynamic functions thanks to the features, the revolution brought about by variable fonts consists in the possibility for each character to vary along different “axes”, making the intermediate steps of these transitions usable.

This technology allows to include a wide range of typographic styles within a single font and therefore greater efficiency in the management of typefaces on the web both from the point of view of the speed of access to the pages and from that of the responsive design take advantage of variability.

But it also makes it possible to have a calibrated character suitable for every context, a quality made necessary by the technological context, in which a parametric and adaptive logic prevails.

Variability also widens the creative possibilities in the development of dynamic typography.

This opens up design spaces in greater dialogue with the needs of responsive design, potentially unlimited creative and expressive possibilities as well as the opportunity to improve consistency in the implementation of typographic systems oriented towards branding in the various touchpoints.

Didactics

Frequency

The course has a duration of 40 hours

The course will be held remotely and in Italian during the month of October 2021 

Training objectives

The workshop aims to provide participants with the opportunity to develop a conceptual font on the issues of variability and interpolation. The path will start from the development of the initial idea to generation, and then experiment with web applications of the designed and generated variable font.

Didactic Modules

The course is structured in two modules.

module 01 / variable font processing

Teacher: Luciano Perondi

In the first module, lasting three days (24 hours), students will move from the initial processing of the variable font to the design of a restricted set of glyphs on multiple masters, developing the concept of tweens and contextual variants.

In a first phase we will think about the concept of interpolation in relation to the current technological possibilities and we will produce a modular character capable of rapidly producing a prototype to be used to experiment on the concepts of variability.

The concept of the flexible module and its application within a typeface will be developed within the course.

We will discuss and put into practice some working methods that allow a faster prototyping of characters.

module 02 / character generation

Teacher: Daniele Capo

In the second module, lasting two days (16 hours), we will analyze the structure of the OpenType format and then move on from the masters, designed in the first module, to the generation of the variable character using fontmake. Some applications will be processed with the generated font, in particular in the field of web design, based on the dynamic use of fonts.

Title Released

An open badge in Variable Font will be issued at the end of the course.

Employment Opportunities

The course perfects the training of graphic designers and front-end developers by making them acquire the ability to design and generate a variable font to be used for communication and interface design purposes.

Admission

Requirements

The path is aimed at:

• students and recent graduates in graphic design and visual communication design disciplines;
• industry professionals interested in developing typographic systems for their professional practice;
• web designer and front-end developer.

Price

€ 1.000 + iva

Faculty

Director of the Higher Education Course: Francesco Guida