Variable fonts are the future for print, web, app, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Variable fonts are a font file type that stores a much larger range of design variants all within one font file. The common current file types are .OTF and .TTF; open type and true type respectively. These fonts use a separate file for each font style available (e.g. condensed, heavy, italic, thin, etc.). But variable fonts not only contain all the font styles in a single file, but they do not have the same font style and specialty glyph limits – by a lot!

Unfortunately, variable fonts are not used everywhere yet, and are not recognized by many apps – including PowerPoint. Everything about them sounds great – and the TLC Creative team is excited to see the design world shift to variable fonts. In reality, web browsers are currently the main apps that recognize and have the ability to leverage variable font features. PowerPoint and Adobe PDF, for example, do not like variable fonts, and can only display the base font style correctly. Encouragingly, Microsoft has started implementing variable fonts into the Windows OS font engine (see note below), and other Adobe apps recognize and can use variable fonts to varying degrees.

DYNAMIC STYLING AND ANIMATION EFFECTS

While it may be a while before we see the animation capabilities that variable fonts bring to typography, it is something we are looking forward to. The above example of web-based variable font animation effects is from this Google page – imagine having this type of animation on slides!).

MICROSOFT AND VARIABLE FONTS

The exciting news is the Microsoft font engine has already been updated to be compatible with variable fonts, and all of their styling features. Further, everyone with Windows has at least two variable fonts: Bahnschrift and Selawik. Bahnschrift offers 13 variations, all housed in a single font file. Selawik only offers 4 font variations in its single file. Ironically, because of legacy and compatibility concerns, most everyone will find these fonts on their computer in the older .ttf format – and multiple individual files… But trust me, Windows is Variable font ready.

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP AND VARIABLE FONTS

One of the easiest apps to see the formatting features of variable fonts is Photoshop CC. Photoshop not only recognizes the multiple font style options in the single variable font file, but allows full control of some of the styling options. For example, in the Character panel, the “weight” and “width” settings use sliders to truly customize for a completely vector-based and non-destructive styling. How the characters of a variable font are displayed for that project is based on the variable font styling applied.

The Bahnschrift font is a Microsoft font. Adobe apps can use Adobe TypeKit fonts (that are automatically locally installed) and all of the Microsoft fonts because they are also installed on the computer.

In Microsoft fonts we cannot do this, but in Photoshop, the Microsoft Bahnschrift variable font is recognized as a variable font and several variable font formatting options are available.

THE FUTURE

Variable fonts are the future, and we are hopeful that that future comes to PowerPoint sooner than later so we can have better typography styling – and integrate the dynamic styling options into animation effects!

Currently, it is better to steer clear of using variable fonts in PowerPoint presentations, as PowerPoint is unable to access most of the styling options and none of the display customization options…

-The TLC Creative design team (special thanks to Christie for creating this article)