One instance of the interactive greeting card.
Dancing Characters
My new year’s card for 2019 is showcasing a variable font with a freestyle design space reacting on user input. Move your mouse and the letters will dance!
Variable Fonts
Thanks to the OpenType variable font format published in 2016, typefaces can contain muteable glyphs while remaining (machine) readable text. In fact, one font may contain the equivalent of several fonts.
Design space
The interpolation runs between two or more extremes (masters). The axes define how the variations take place. The typeface can become wider/narrower or bolder/lighter, for example.
Every instance in the design space can be selected in the layout software or via CSS. This means that the typeface can also be animated or react to user input, which is one of the big potentials of variable fonts.
I gave an extensive talk on variable fonts at the “Tag der Schrift” 2018 in Zurich.
My small font “Dancing Queen” for the New Year card contains 2 axes: one for the weight and another one named “dance”. The latter is inspired by joyful lettering with glyphs bouncing up and down the baseline.
Sketch for variable lettering “Dancing Queen”.
Another instance of the variable lettering.
Try it yourself on christinegertsch.net/2019
