Once Upon a Drop Cap

When words were the experience & letters were your voice

What we have to say has always been intimately intertwined with how we say it. Design is about communicating those ideas and influencing our behavior; so it follows that influence is imparted largely by how we design. For all our intellectual complexity, our brains are still wired to make near-instant judgements about the value and importance of the message we are receiving based on how that message appears.

Thankfully most of us are still familiar enough with actual books to remember the feel of paper under our fingers, the smell of the ink, the elegant transitions from one idea to the next: all in service of the story. While pixels remain odorless, there’s much more we can do than just deliver a digital message. Practiced typography transforms that message into a compelling experience. Let’s take a journey forward through time and look at where it can take us. 

Variable Fonts

Subsequent to the big announcement at ATypI Warsaw about OpenType Variable Fonts, I wrote a bit about what they mean for design on the web, created a demo that you can see online here, and get the code on Github to play around with them yourself!