Shop Sans is a typeface for curved text paths
futurefonts.com87 points by tobr 9 days ago
87 points by tobr 9 days ago
Animated GIF from article shows what a "curve variable font" does:
https://incremental-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/slid...
Very cool
The 'N' in particular is very worth watching. There are really no good answers, but at least an intentional answer is better than an accidental answer.
Bit of an aside but that site is truly awesome. Good to see some real design chops out there. I could browse those fonts for hours.
I'm out of the loop on pricing models for fonts, but is it normal to base it on number of visitors to your site?
Yes, and this pricing is quite reasonable too.
I'm even more outside the loop, what happens if on my personal blog I don't have any analytics and don't do any metering so I have no idea how many visitors I get?
The way these kinds of fonts work is that you don't host the font, they do. You link the font licence you purchased through your HTML code (or CSS, depending on how the foundry recommends you to apply the font) with a specific font URL that they provide you, which will contain unique identifiers. Then they can track how often the font gets loaded.
If your site really kicks off and you max out those visits per month (that they track on their end), they either start charging you the higher tier, cut off loading your font, or send you stern emails.
There is no expectation that you share your analytics with a type foundry.
That’s not true. I’ve bought fonts on Future Fonts and I received a download link to get the files. I think it’s fundamentally an honor system.
When there's a license you're either violating the license agreement or you're not. That's not an honor system.
No, "honor system" is very frequently used and understood to refer to a system where there are explicit rules but where the rules are not enforced via active surveillance.
Not to take away from your fantastic explanation but I should note that’s not universal. There are foundries that operate on an honor basis and let you self host the font too.
> You link the font licence you purchased through your HTML code
Ugh, hard pass for me. It a nice font thought
This is consistent with photo licensing, which is often scaled based on the potential number of viewers for both print and digital.
Depends on the vendor… some also prevent things like subsetting or rely on methods for counting usage that slow down pages (Typekit)
Hmm I wonder how hard it would be to incorporate into maps. There's often a big problem laying out road labels legibly along windy roads.
is this for someone that doesn't have access to proper typesetting software? i guess that could be cool if along side the font size you have a radius entry for programs that do not have a type-on-path tool. i'm just spoiled and have the proper tools so this causes me to tilt my head and ask why
It's not just about curving the baseline, the glyphs themselves curve according to the user-specified curve radius. Check out the second image/gif with curve optimizations on/off.
What font features enable this? (curious how it is implemented and which software supports it)
From what I can tell, it's a variable font, where the font developer can declare an axis (in this case "curve," or more likely "CURV") and the font user can control the value of that axis (e.g. via CSS) which controls how the font renders itself.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Font...
This site demonstrates many highly stylized and artistic variable font axes:
This is about how each character adapts to the radius, not the path itself. Each character is tweaked so the design holds up as it’s curved. I don’t think you have tools to do that.
FWIW, people have glyph warping text (both on and off paths) using tools like Adobe Illustrator for as long as I can remember. I also don't quite get why one might want a capability that supports one type of glyph warping in the typeface itself.
A font is designed to have certain attributes (e.g. harmony between the letters). It is not clear that this harmony is preserved if you distort the font algorithmically. For this font the designer ensured that it is preserved.
I get that part (I've designed commercial typefaces), but as I understand it, (1) this only works for type on circles or circular arcs, and (2) the typeface has no awareness of the circle/segment it's on, so the designer still has to manually match the Curve property to the radius.
I think this is really cool and interesting work by Nick Sherman. I just wonder if I'm correct about the limited applications, and what could be done to enable the kind of "contextual intelligence" that would enable fonts to better optimize themselves for a broader set of types of envelope deformations.
Because it allows the effect of the curvature to be customized by hand for each letter shape by a skilled designer. Fonts like italics, bold or condensed can also be approximated with simple geometric operations, but I think you would agree that that looks terrible.
The definition of just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Giving me a migraine.
Not sure what you mean, and I'm not that versed in typography but as a graphic designer I'd bet people who actually know typography would appreciate something like this: laying out normal typefaces along a curve distort the space between letters and the top and bottom edges of letters won't follow the curvature they're being traced to until you do "manual" work (unless there's some auto-warping solution for fonts in something like Illustrator I am not aware of).
Of course this is not meant for prose texts or something, but for logo design this is a great thing to have.
