Aug 24, 2023

Video: Fonts are software

Catch up on Google Fonts' talk at Figma Config 2023

Posted by


If you were a web designer in the early days of the Internet, you might remember that there were few “web safe” typefaces, such as Arial and Georgia. As a result, many websites looked similar. To use a new typeface, you had to embed small Flash files for each heading in your layout.

Now with web fonts and variable fonts, the situation has changed dramatically. Designers have many more typeface choices to customize their websites and brands.

Here are some of the ways that variable fonts are changing type:

  • They allow designers to create more nuanced and expressive typography with different weights, widths, and other axes.
  • They can improve the performance of web pages by reducing the number of font files that need to be loaded.

Tobias Kunisch went from being a webmaster at Google in 2010 to being one of the co-founders of Google Fonts, whose mission is to provide open source fonts without charge. Kunisch spoke at the Figma Config Conference in June 2023 in San Francisco about how fonts are like software and how they open up new digital design possibilities.

Watch his talk on YouTube:

Subscribe to Material Design for even more design-related videos.