Make Icons Editable, Animated, and Colorful with Font Technologies

with Wenting Zhang

Discover new ways to make icons customizable, animate-able, colorful, and recolor-able by utilizing variable font and color font technology.

With the latest developments in variable and color fonts, typography and iconography are becoming enriched! Join us for a talk with Wenting Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Typogram, who will share new ways to utilize variable font and color font technology for icons — to make icons customizable, animate-able, colorful, and recolor-able:

Customizable

Variable font tech can be seen as a bezier curve editing capability. With that, icons can enjoy controlled editing capacity without exposing the hard-to-manipulate bezier curves and control points.

Animatable

The variable font axis can be seen as an animation timeline. With that, icons as glyphs can go through a series of transformations and appear animated.

Colorful and Recolor-able

Arguably color font technology is better suited for icon font than for text. Icon font used to be quite limited for the lack of support for popular dual-tone icons, which is being changed with color fonts. Not only can icon fonts be colorful, but it also brings an easy way to recolor them to fit the brand.

Letterform Lectures are a public aspect of the Type West postgraduate program. The series is co-presented by the San Francisco Public Library, where events are free and open to all.