As somebody who is actually into fonts, I do know that most individuals don’t share my ardour — however I genuinely suppose that anybody who cares in any respect about typography may have some curiosity in what Google announced on Thursday. If you’ve ever used something made by Google, you’ve seen Roboto. Now, Google’s introducing one thing referred to as Roboto Flex. As the identify implies, it’s a model of its well-known font that you may tweak and customise in a ton of the way.

I can sense I is perhaps about to lose lots of people, so let’s do this: right here’s a gif exhibiting all of the customizable parameters Roboto Flex has. There’s no trickery occurring — I’m not altering a raster picture with Photoshop or something. Everything you see is constructed into the font itself and might be modified as simply because the font dimension.

Pretty cool, proper? (If you simply mentioned “no” to your pc display, you’ve got my permission to depart now. This isn’t going to get any extra attention-grabbing for you.)

Basically, what’s taking place is that Roboto Flex is a “variable font,” which means that you just don’t must manually load separate information to make adjustments to its weight, slant, or different variables. Flex goes additional than simply the fundamental adjustments, although; Google says there are 12 alternative ways you possibly can tweak it, together with altering its width, stroke thickness, and even the heights of ascending and descending stems (like are discovered on the letters “d” and “p,” respectively).

Image: Google

These sorts of fonts have been round for some time — even Roboto Flex has been publicly in the works for a year or so, nevertheless it’s cool to see that Google’s making it available to anybody that desires to make use of it.

Roboto Flex additionally has a number of different attention-grabbing options that aren’t instantly associated to creating it look cool. In its blog post, Google says it’s put a whole lot of balancing into the font to ensure that it appears to be like proper at particular sizes, so the textual content will look correctly daring or skinny, whether or not it’s taking on a complete web page or is only a teeny footnote. Google’s announcement additionally will get into how the font’s designers (a studio referred to as Font Bureau) made positive tiny particulars have been proper. Apparently, the circles used within the p.c image are proportionally the identical because the numeral 0. That is a few hardcore font nerdery, and I like it.

What this all means in observe is that designers have a whole lot of management over how their textual content finally ends up wanting with out having to do a whole lot of work (assuming the applying they’re working with actually supports variable fonts). It’s additionally nice for net designers who desire a standard-looking font that they’ll tweak to ensure their headings and titles stand out, each from the remainder of the textual content on the web page and from different web sites. It additionally doesn’t damage that, as a result of it’s a Google Font, you possibly can add it to your web site with one or two strains of code.

Plus… look, this can be going out on a limb right here, however I couldn’t assist however take into consideration all of the enjoyable UI issues you might do if this have been the font on, say, a telephone with a folding show. You know, just like the one Google’s supposedly engaged on? It’s straightforward to think about visible methods just like the font stretching when you fold open your telephone or the place textual content retains the identical proportions once you go from the small entrance display to the bigger inside display. That kind of factor could be a lot simpler to implement when you’re working with a versatile font and could be actually enjoyable to see in observe (and Google’s all about enjoyable in Android now, proper?)

This isn’t the one attention-grabbing font Google’s made just lately. It additionally introduced a seriffed model of Roboto, which would appear like heresy if it didn’t really look very nice, and it even brought back the beloved blobs in its Noto Emoji font. It’s not the one one taking part in round with variable fonts both — Apple’s SF Pro, which is used because the default font on just about all of its gadgets, helps variable optical sizes, and Microsoft’s programmer-focused Cascadia Code helps variable weights.