
Decovar – A multistyle decorative variable font - davelab6
https://www.typenetwork.com/brochure/decovar-a-decorative-variable-font-by-david-berlow/
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j-pb
Like the vulcans say: "Infinity ugliness in infinite combinations."

Seriously I couldn't find one decent looking version of that font...

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webmaven
Then you really aren't trying hard enough.

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dsr_
That's pretty cool, but in order to use it on my desktop, do I need an all-new
font widget that can control every aspect of the specification? Or do I fiddle
on a webapp until I get the one that I want, download it and use it as
normal... and now I have a thousand variants of Decovar that I have to squint
at very carefully to differentiate?

I'm not complaining about choice, I just want to know if anybody has thought
about usability.

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davelab6
Yes, all applications now need an all-new font widget. The first program with
such a widget is
[https://github.com/googlei18n/fontview](https://github.com/googlei18n/fontview)

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and0
This is really cool. Did anyone else try to drag the "Drag Me!" bubble for 10
seconds, though? Instead of the line itself, I mean.

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dEnigma
Yup, it's like a door that says "PUSH" or a button that says "Click me!", I
automatically -and I think understandably- assumed I should drag the thing
it's written on, not the thing next to it

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dberlow
Wow, thanks for all your comments. I even clicked on the Drag sign myself. We
can make it that way too.

Ugliness vs Beauty, is a subjective judgement, and if one person, or 1,000
thinks it either way, the type designer is usually trying to please just one
person.

In this case, the designer is trying to please a range of tastes, in both
print and animation, from subtle stroking of the style, barely perceptible
like the sound your fingers make parting to drop a pin, which is one whole
tradition in type use, to making your eyes bleed, the range of which
variations are all about, and has been for centuries.

We'd certainly appreciate the Hacker News hackers' perspective on Use! User
Interfaces! CSS, and how applications should continue to support variations,
in more sensible ways.

You can do that here, and also there are several other places you can sound in
if you start hacking around. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and many others will be
offering pretty fonts soon. I felt it'd be good to make sure to get people's
eyes to bleed first, to open them up. Thanks for that confirmation.

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j-pb
Font is about readability. You can use it to convey emotion and style as well
but readability must come first. It takes carefull tuning to achieve that in a
stylistic font and I doubt it is possible at all in a font like this. The
kerning in this thing is just painful. Additionally the rendering engine has
to be even more complex then that stuff already is.

This entire thing is an anti feature, it looks worse and is less readable,
makes the implementation of stuff harder, and nobody needs it, but hey some
people can feel smug.

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webmaven
_> but readability must come first._

Not so. Typefaces are (as with most two dimensional design) about
_communication_. Legibility is merely the most straightforward means by which
a typeface enables communication (of the text), but there are many other
things that can be communicated (emotions, age, time, place, personality,
intellect, attitude, sanity, ideology, and on and on).

Sure this typeface has some pretty extreme variations, and the interface
certainly encourages the use of the entire gamut, but nothing says that you
can't be subtle. Remember when drop-shadows were new and everything looked
like it was levitating at least a half-inch off the background? Ignoring for
the moment the "flat design" interregnum, we've used dropshadows ever since,
but over time in a much more restrained way.

Anyway, this _particular_ typeface is clearly meant as an eye-catching demo of
the technology, and even a lighter touch still leaves you with an all-caps
display font. Less overt and garish variations (along the lines of the older
Multiple Master fonts) are possible and are clearly in the works:
[https://www.typenetwork.com/brochure/opentype-variable-
fonts...](https://www.typenetwork.com/brochure/opentype-variable-fonts-moving-
right-along/)

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falsedan
Sounds an awful lot like METAFONT.

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thechao
The thing I absolutely miss the most from grad school is porting my advisor's
whiteboard chicken scratch into parametric METAPOST graphics. It let us size &
scope images to their target: posters, conference papers, slides, journal
publications, etc.

