When I first discovered that a font could do much more than just plop drawings of letters on the screen, I felt like I’d been let in on a big secret. Characters could change their appearance, their position, the whole atmosphere of the text, all based on nearby characters or on features you could turn on and off. Magic!
Both font-feature-settings and font-variation-settings take a list of font properties. The caveat is that every property you don’t set will be set to it’s default value. This makes it hard to change one setting without unsetting the rest. But luckily CSS variables can be used to fix this problem!
Variable fonts have a hidden superpower that just not enough people are raving about. 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. All you need is a variable font with an optical size axis!
Did you know? Wakamai Fondue is also command line tool! You can use it to generate all the CSS for all your fonts. No need to head over to the website, drag’n’drop your font, click the “Download stylesheet” button, save the file, and all that hassle. Just type wakamai-fondue -c MyFont.woff2 and the CSS will flood your terminal window! Bleep bloop!
I’m about to have some time off, so this week was about prepping everything for after the time off. On the tech side this was all relatively straightforward: more fine-tuning of existing Wakamai Fondue UI components. We’re now able to offer a demo font so you can try out Wakamai Fondue without having to hunt down a font on your own computer. Yay!
This week was about covering more groundwork: fleshing out the website, and working on the underlying engine. This is that magic moment where the codebase is devoid of legacy, TODOs and cut corners. Not surprisingly, as it also doesn’t contain a lot of code.
Today’s the day! My little nugget of news about Wakamai Fondue went public. I’m still walking on clouds over this. I get to work on my favorite project, improving it and making it open source!
For this post we need the following ingredients:
2009 — the year Michael Jackson died, Obama became president of the USA, and Avatar hit the silver screen.
About a year ago I was contacted by the people from Fontself, a software company from France and early adopters of color fonts, to work on a new project. They already had Fontself Maker, a tool to create fonts from the comfort of Adobe Illustrator, and were planning to add a new service to help designers publish their fonts on the web. The intersection of webfonts and color fonts is of course…