Our co-announcement in September about variable fonts was a huge hit with the type industry — we’re excited to see this technology in development and believe in the enormous potential the format offers.

The Adobe Type team has continued working on this, and has now released a prototype variable font on Github, produced by Miguel Sousa and Read Roberts, and based on Frank Grießhammer’s Source Serif.

The prototype font is precisely that, and is meant to demonstrate features of variable fonts, such as the interaction of possible weights and degrees of stroke contrast in this example. It’s not intended for production use, and is currently only viewable through FontView — an open-source macOS demo application.

One of the next steps we’re most excited for is to see variable fonts working in browsers. At this point, that’s a question of preparing rendering engines to successfully parse the additional tables that the variable font format includes. We’re actively discussing this now with our colleagues at Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

We’ve got more prototype fonts underway, too, thanks to senior computer scientist Read Roberts. Keep an eye on our variable fonts news page for new information and resources.

If you have questions about the prototype font, the best place to join the community discussion is either on the Github repository itself, or in the variable fonts threads on Type Drawers.