The Research of Tool Making Towards Intuitive Variable Font Specimens

With the rising popularity of Variable Fonts - what should an ideal Variable Font specimen look like? As Variable Fonts span complex design spaces, intuitive navigation and display tools to accompany them are in need, to present the endless options while maintaining a smooth design experience. How can this be achieved? Combining practices from Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction and Design, we wish to make Variable Fonts more accessible to designers to use.

Following last years’ talk, where we presented a visual interactive specimen, in this years’ talk we will cover the research process accompanying the tool making process. We will review the various paradigms harnessed, and the research conducted, towards the tool making process. Then, examining translation from theory to practice, the we will inspect how each insight from the research manifests in the final tool, and how it was received by designers in the user study that was conducted. Going over were we got it wrong and what we did right in our Variable Font specimen, we can learn towards building better Variable Font specimens and interfaces in the future.