Some Typography Links

  • Glitter text — whO (I learned a name for people who go by a one-word moniker like that: Mononymous) created a builder for fancy SVG-based type. It’s a custom font with <text>, and the fancy comes in with a gradient and somewhat exotic filters that make noise and blend the noise into the color.
  • Optical Size tweaking for dark mode — Mark Boulton opens by questioning the usefulness of variable fonts (blaspheme!) but then finds a nice use case in adjusting the optical size in dark mode. Robin covered that right here not too long ago.
  • Optical size, the hidden superpower of variable fonts — Speaking of optical size, Roel Nieskens digs into that here. It’s not just a weight thing… This feature will make letters actually change the way they look when shown in small or large sizes. It all happens automatically in the browser.”
  • Updates to v-fonts.com — Annnnd speaking of variable fonts, Piper Haywood talks about some updates to v-fonts.com, introducing some browsable taxonomies. It takes me about 20 seconds browing this site to want to redesign everything using variable fonts.
  • All you need is 5 fonts — (Matej Latin) I’ve been hearing about these mythical designers who focus all their creative energy on deep-learning how to use a very limited set of fonts. Maybe it’s kinda the same as us web nerds who only know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and leave it at that.
  • Best practices for fontsJust like CSS, fonts affect Web Core Vitals in big ways (e.g. layout shifts and paints). Katie Hempenius is at it again here covering how to make fonts faster. I think these best practices are starting to set in a bit… preconnecting to the font host, subsetting, font-display, etc.
  • Sans Bullshit Sans — Kinda like the Cloud to Butt browser plugin, only the text replacements are done via ligatures (🤯) converting them into little Comic Sans badges. Some of them are angled? How the heck does that work?
  • Bryan Font — Jon Hicks builds a font for his father, John Bryan Hicks, who passed away. What a loving tribute.
  • Inherit ancestor font-size, for fun and profit — Lea Verou finds yet another use case for @property. I wonder if it’s an emerging best practice to register all your custom properties, since it unlocks possibilites and makes them behave more like you expect them to behave. Lea shows how you can browser test for @property in JavaScript, but if you for some reason you can’t do that and don’t mind pretty mind-bending CSS, Jane has pure CSS way.

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