It may not come as a surprise that a lot of my job at this point is yapping about fonts. This talk took place on November 7, 2017 in the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Public Library as part of Type@Cooper West‘s Letterform Lecture Series. This recording was made possible by a generous sponsorship from Adobe Typekit.
After 20 years of relative stability, the OpenType format has been expanding its capabilities recently with the introduction of new extensions allowing preset color effects and dynamic access to variations. Color fonts and variable fonts expand both the possibilities and challenges for typeface design and development, but we’re are only just starting to seeing their potential in action. This talk will review the nature of these new formats as well as what they may make possible.