Variable fonts are fonts that allow for a wide range of possible weights, widths, and shapes, all within a single font file. This means that a designer can create a typeface with multiple variants, all while using a single font file. This opens up new possibilities for font design, and makes it possible to create typefaces that are more expressive and versatile.
This makes it easy to create unique and interesting typography that wasn’t possible before. Variable fonts are still in development, but they are likely to become the standard font format in the near future.
What are Variable fonts?
Archivo Font
Archivo is a grotesque sans-serif typeface family that is reminiscent of late nineteenth century American typefaces. It was designed for both print and online platforms and supports over 200 world languages. The technical and aesthetic characteristics of the font are both crafted for high performance typography.
Bitter
Motivated by my love for the pixel I designed Bitter. A “contemporary” slab serif typeface for text, it is specially designed for comfortably reading on any computer or device. The robust design started from the austerity of the pixel grid, based on rational rather than emotional principles. It combines the large x-heights and legibility of the humanistic tradition with subtle characteristics in the characters that inject a certain rhythm to flowing texts.
Bitter has little variation in stroke weight and the Regular is thicker than a normal ‘Regular’ style for print design. This generates an intense color in paragraphs, accentuated by the serifs that are as thick as strokes with square terminals.
Each glyph is carefully designed with an excellent curve quality added to the first stage of the design, that was entirely made in a pixel grid. The typeface is balanced and manually spaced to use very few kerning pairs, especially important for web font use since most browsers do not currently support this feature.
Bodoni Moda
Bodoni Moda is a font family that is designed for the digital age. It includes a full range of weights, italics, and an extended character set. It also features OpenType features and optical sizes. There are a total of 64 font files in this family.
Brygada 1918
Brygada 1918 is a revival project created for the celebration of the 100 years of independence of the Republic of Poland in 2018, with the support of the “Independent” program and the President of the Republic of Poland. The typeface is based on the catalogue entry of the National Type Foundry from 1954, and a set of matrices found at the Book Arts Museum by Janusz Tryzno in 2016.
Cabin
Cabin is a humanist sans inspired by Edward Johnston’s and Eric Gill’s typefaces, with a touch of modernism. Cabin incorporates modern proportions, optical adjustments, and some elements of the geometric sans. It remains true to its roots, but has its own personality.
The Cabin font family comes in two variable fonts, roman and true italic, with a Weight range from Regular to Bold, and a Width range from normal to Condensed. The stroke contrast is almost monolinear, although top and bottom curves are slightly thinned. Counters of the b, g, p and q are rounded, and all are optically adjusted.
Cuprum
Cuprum was created in 2006 based on the works Miles Newlyn. Cuprum is a narrow grotesque. It is quite versatile. Mostly how it is now, I do not like myself, because as time passed and since then I have learned to make fonts much better. An interesting history of the appearance of his name: Cuprum is copper, not gold or silver. Copper is too noble, but it is much cheaper and copper is not used for medals – only pots.
EB Garamond
EB Garamond is intended to be an excellent, classical, Garamond. It is a community project to create a revival of Claude Garamont’s famous humanist typefaces from the mid-16th century. This digital version reproduces the original design by Claude Garamont closely: The source for the letterforms is a scan of a specimen known as the “Berner specimen,” which was composed in 1592 by Conrad Berner, the son-in-law of Christian Egenolff and his successor at the Egenolff print office. This specimen shows Garamont’s roman and Granjon’s italic types at different sizes. Hence the name of this project: Egenolff-Berner Garamond.
Fira Code
Programmers use a lot of symbols, often encoded with several characters. For the human brain, sequences like ->, <= or := are single logical tokens, even if they take two or three characters on the screen. Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one. Ideally, all programming languages should be designed with full-fledged Unicode symbols for operators, but that’s not the case yet.
Inter
Inter is a variable font family carefully crafted & designed for computer screens.
Inter features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate “0” from “o”, tabular numbers, etc.
Josefin Slab
Josefin Slab was the first typeface–at least in my mind–I designed! But I decided to start simple with Josefin Sans. Following the 1930s trend for geometric typefaces, it just came to me that something between Kabel and Memphis with modern details will look great.
I wanted to stick to the idea of Scandinavian style, so I put a lot of attention to the diacritics, especially to “æ” which has loops connecting in a continuous way, so the “e” slope was determined by this character.
It also has some typewriter style attributes, because I’ve liked the Letter Gothic typeface since I was in high school, and that’s why I decided to make a Slab version of Josefin Sans.
Jost
Jost is an original font created by indestructible type*. It is inspired by 1920s German sans-serifs. This is version 3.7. Jost is designed and maintained by Owen Earl, who is the creator of the font foundry indestructible type*. in 2020 Owen Earl, and Mirko Velimirovic worked together to make Jost a variable font.
Literata
Literata is a distinct variable font family for digital text. Originally created as the brand typeface for Google Play Books, it exceeds the strict needs of a comfortable reading experience on any device, screen resolution, or font size. The family has matured into a full-fledged digital publishing toolbox — headline, paragraph, and caption text.
Lora
Lora is a well-balanced contemporary serif with roots in calligraphy. It is a text typeface with moderate contrast well suited for body text.
A paragraph set in Lora will make a memorable appearance because of its brushed curves in contrast with driving serifs. The overall typographic voice of Lora perfectly conveys the mood of a modern-day story, or an art essay.
Montserrat
The old posters and signs in the traditional Montserrat neighborhood of Buenos Aires inspired Julieta Ulanovsky to design this typeface and rescue the beauty of urban typography that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. As urban development changes that place, it will never return to its original form and loses forever the designs that are so special and unique. The letters that inspired this project have work, dedication, care, color, contrast, light and life, day and night! These are the types that make the city look so beautiful.
Open Sans
Open Sans is a humanist sans serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson, Type Director of Ascender Corp. This version contains the complete 897 character set, which includes the standard ISO Latin 1, Latin CE, Greek and Cyrillic character sets. Open Sans was designed with an upright stress, open forms and a neutral, yet friendly appearance. It was optimized for print, web, and mobile interfaces, and has excellent legibility characteristics in its letterforms.
Oswald
Oswald is a reworking of the classic style historically represented by the ‘Alternate Gothic’ sans serif typefaces. The characters of Oswald were initially re-drawn and reformed to better fit the pixel grid of standard digital screens. Oswald is designed to be used freely across the internet by web browsers on desktop computers, laptops and mobile devices.
Since the initial launch in 2011, Oswald was updated continually by Vernon Adams until 2014. Vernon added Light and Bold weights, support for more Latin and Cyrillic languages, tightened the spacing and kerning and made many glyph refinements throughout the family based on hundreds of users’ feedback. In 2016 the Latin part of the family was updated by Kalapi Gajjar to complete the work started by Vernon. In January 2019, it was updated with a variable font Weight axis.
Overpass
Overpass is a free, Open Source typeface. The design of Overpass is an interpretation of the well-known “Highway Gothic” letterforms from the Standard Alphabets for Traffic Control Devices published by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration. Starting from those specifications, critical adjustments were made to the letterforms to create an optimal presentation at smaller sizes on-screen and later for display sizes, especially in the lighter weights.
Playfair Display
Playfair is a transitional design. In the European Enlightenment in the late 18th century, broad nib quills were replaced by pointed steel pens as the popular writing tool of the day. Together with developments in printing technology, ink, and paper making, it became to print letterforms of high contrast and delicate hairlines that were increasingly detached from the written letterforms.
This design lends itself to this period, and while it is not a revival of any particular design, it takes influence from the designs of John Baskerville and from ‘Scotch Roman’ designs. Being a Display (large size) design in the transitional genre, functionally and stylistically it can accompany Georgia for body text.
Recursive
Recursive is typographic palette for UI & code. It draws inspiration from single-stroke casual, a style of brush writing used in signpainting that is stylistically flexible and warmly energetic. Recursive adapts this aesthetic basis into an extensive variable font family, designed to excel in digital interactive environments, including data-rich user interfaces, technical documentation, and code editors.
Roboto Serif
Roboto Serif is a variable typeface family designed to create a comfortable and frictionless reading experience. Minimal and highly functional, it is useful anywhere (even for app interfaces) due to the extensive set of weights and widths across a broad range of optical sizes. While it was carefully crafted to work well in digital media, across the full scope of sizes and resolutions we have today, it is just as comfortable to read and work in print media.
Rubik
Rubik is a sans serif font family with slightly rounded corners designed by Philipp Hubert and Sebastian Fischer at Hubert & Fischer as part of the Chrome Cube Lab project.
Rubik is a 5 weight family with Roman and Italic styles, that accompanies Rubik Mono One, a monospaced variation of the Black roman design.
Source Sans 3
Source® Sans Pro, Adobe’s first open source typeface family, was designed by Paul D. Hunt. It is a sans serif typeface intended to work well in user interfaces.
Vollkorn
Vollkorn came into being as the first typeface design by Friedrich Althausen. First published in 2005 under a Creative Commons license, it was soon downloaded thousands of times and used in all kinds of web and print projects.
It intends to be a quiet, modest and high quality text face for bread and butter use. Unlike many text typefaces from the Renaissance period until now, it has dark and meaty serifs and a bouncing and healthy look. It might be used in body copy, or just as well for headlines and titles. »Vollkorn« (pronounced »Follkorn«) is German for »wholemeal« which refers to the old term »Brotschrift«. It stood for the small fonts for every day use in hand setting times.
Work Sans
Work Sans is a typeface family based loosely on early Grotesques, such as those by Stephenson Blake, Miller & Richard and Bauerschen Giesserei. The Regular weight and others in the middle of the family are optimised for on-screen text usage at medium-sizes (14px-48px) and can also be used in print design. The fonts closer to the extreme weights are designed more for display use both on the web and in print. Overall, features are simplified and optimised for screen resolutions; for example, diacritic marks are larger than how they would be in print.
We hope you liked our top Variable Fonts collection. You may also like our Google Fonts for Headings list.
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