VOICES
Interview
Traditionally, typography on the web
has been constrained by the need to
balance it with performance. Variable
fonts – which enable many different
variations of a typeface in a single font- not only address the technical issue by
using fewer files, resulting in faster load
times, but also offer new creative
opportunities (see our cover feature in net
318). Web design pioneer Jason Pamental
is convinced that they are the future of
type – and even design as a whole – on
the web.
“Performance is the first piece of design
that a user encounters,” he explains.
“We’ve had it drilled into us that we need
the text to show up quickly on the screen,
so people can start to interact. So we use
fewer fonts and that gets passed off as
good typography. But it’s not. Effective
typography uses a whole range of weights,
widths and implementations. It creates a
strong contrast, visual interest and
hierarchy. Variable fonts allow us to be
more creative and intentional. They give
us the ability to create a more compelling
experience that’s tailored to what the user
needs. The promise for design on the web
is simply ground-breaking.”
Since their introduction in late 2016,
Pamental has been extensively
researching, writing about and working
with variable fonts, as well as spreading
awareness at events and for in-house
teams all over the world. After almost 25
years in the industry, he decided he
wanted to have a bigger impact and
improve typography on a broader scale
rather than just one site at a time, so he
quit his agency job and – realising variablefonts’ potential – began to focus on them
full-time. His work includes educational
materials (for example, a guide for
Mozilla’s MDN site), demos for Monotype
and Type Network and a ton of resources
on his own site. Pamental firmly believes
that typography is the most foundational
element of design and central to tying
together brand, content and the user in a
cohesive, engaging and usable experience.
And so he is on a mission to help
organisations, teams and type designers
use variable fonts to unlock the full power
of typography and make the web more
readable and visually interesting.
Browser support for variable fonts is
now almost complete (with the exception
of IE11 and a couple of Android browsers
like Baidu and UC) and there are plenty
of fonts to choose from. However, while
they are perfectly safe to use in production,
most applications so far have just been
purely experimental.
We haven’t quite reached that tipping
point yet but recently there have been
some noticeable commercial applications
that suggest we’re getting there. Pamental
last year worked with the digital services
team of the State of Georgia to create a
new typographic system for its web
platform. It uses a variable font, while
safely delivering the static web font
version for all state employees, who are
still on IE11. “We used CSS feature
detection with @support to scope the use
of the variable font,” Pamental explains.
“Browsers that support it will load that
asset instead of a static one.” The system
has now been deployed to over 40 sites
and is being viewed by millions of people
a month.
UX consulting firm Nielsen Norman
Group, meanwhile, decided to use Source
Sans Variable (an open-source font
released by Adobe) on nngroup.com simply
because it was faster. “They didn’t change
anything about their design,” Pamental
points out. “They just swapped in that
asset because it decreased the page
download size. Google has actually been
doing this with Oswald, one of the top five
web fonts and they didn’t even tell
anybody! Google Fonts started serving a
variable version of the font on sites with