How future forward are your fonts?

Typography conversations often focus around a font's brand, aesthetic and personality attributes. This week, we're looking at examples of custom typefaces that are not only beautiful, but also designed specifically to accomplish key business and technical performance goals. How future forward are your fonts?

Recently, Dynatrace profiled the development of their custom typeface DT Flow. Since their core software product contains numerous charts, tables and visualizations they needed a branded font that combined technical usability features like tabular number alignment and character-level legibility with the readability and space saving features of humanistic fonts.

Late last year, Github released open source versions of its two fonts Mona Sans and Hubot Sans. These variable fonts give users dynamic control over font metrics including width (condensed to expanded), weight (ultra thin to extra heavy) and slant (regular to italics). By using a single file to render all font variations, they're improving page loading and rendering scores. They’ve even provided examples how to use the size-adjust and ascent-override CSS properties with backup fonts to prevent unwanted page layout shifts that can occur as your custom fonts load.

Google Fonts recently showcased examples of multiplexed fonts. These fonts take up the same amount of horizontal space across variants to help eliminate line wrapping and rendering issues caused when text changes from regular to bold on hover. Since these capabilities are built into the font itself there is no need for additional scripts or libraries.

Futures & Foresights is a weekly newsletter of curated links from our Director of Technology, Will Turnage

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