#24 Flexible by Art Grootfontein
Q1: Where did the idea for the typeface come from? Did you set out to address a specific use or suite of the application? Was this a design you’d had in mind for a while?
Ans: The idea for Flexible came from the late 19th century’s broadsides. The designers at the time were so creative and used stretching letters to fill their design pages. I thought it could be awesome to create a variable font that allows designers to play with the height and width of each letter as they saw fit. It had never been done before, but I quickly saw why; it’s tough work. I love kinetic typography, so I developed Flexible with animation in mind, but its specific options are great for creative title designs no matter the media.
Q2: What is the one or two most important things graphic communicators should know about the typeface, or how will the family of fonts help them create better design?
Ans: The variable options are a great tool for testing. Always play with height and width to try different layouts, you could be surprised: the possibilities are endless! The second thing is that variable fonts are young. This technology is already supported in the 3 main Adobe design apps (Indesign, Photoshop & Illustrator) but is not implemented in office apps like Word, Pages or PowerPoint yet. Still things are progressing fast and soon support for variable fonts will be as natural as for diacritics font.