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I put a good deal of thought into making Recursive and Name Sans so that they might be useful in animations! In Name Sans, the Hairline is very thin, with the goal of allow text to be "revealed" from the center lines. In Recursive, all glyph forms stay constant throughout styles (e.g. the dollar sign bar never changes), and multiplexed widths allow transitions without changing line length. |
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(edited 2023-06-01 for newer timing apis)
One question that keeps coming up from new Coldtype users is: what are some good variable fonts to animate with? Coldtype does come with two variable fonts built-in (
Font.ColdtypeObviously()
andFont.MutatorSans()
), but both of those have limitations (only the lettersCDELOPTY
in the former case, and only upper-case ASCII in the latter), so I thought it'd be fun to put together a list of commercial and open-source faces that work well for animation.In general, a really "animatable" variable font usually has an axis other than
wght
(aka weight), which seems to be the most common axis in variable font world. Nothing againstwght
, it’s just not the most visible when it comes to animation. Same goes foropsz
(optical size). Both can definitely be animated and look great, but just don't pop the way awdth
does. Oh and alsoslnt
— another great dimension, though without a more visible companion axis, it can be a little harder to leverage in a text animation.Also in general, the best site for finding variable fonts is v-fonts.com
Also also in general, a lot of very capable variable fonts are incredibly expensive, which makes sense given how much work they require, but I want to mention that here because there are a lot of commercial variable fonts from established foundries that I've never tried and wouldn't feel great recommending in this thread, given how expensive they are and that I haven't tried them.
One last in general, if you don’t have FontGoggles and you’re on a Mac, you should get it! It’s a great way to open variable fonts and look at their axes, and it doesn’t require you install fonts on your computer, (which is something I basically never do because Coldtype just uses the filesystem). Just drag the .ttf onto the window, couldn’t be easier.
I'll start the list with ones that I've personally used & own (listed in alphabetical order):
And as a little preview, here's a video of all those fonts (though not an exhaustive video of what each of the fonts can do!):
variables.mp4
(the code to make that video:)
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