{"id":50014,"date":"2018-07-17T18:37:03","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T01:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/?p=50014"},"modified":"2024-04-17T06:28:15","modified_gmt":"2024-04-17T13:28:15","slug":"opentype-features","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/opentype-features","title":{"rendered":"How to Design Beautiful Typography Fast with OpenType Features"},"content":{"rendered":"

A unique font family can become a strong starting point to develop a brand’s visual identity. Fonts convey specific emotions, relate to personality traits, and are great vehicles for brand storytelling. It comes as no surprise, then, that many brands engage in their own custom typeface design processes, resulting in fonts like Netflix Sans<\/a> and Airbnb’s Cereal<\/a>.

A leaner alternative to creating a custom type family for a brand is to tweak an existing font and work with its unique features to project the brand’s values. And we’re all in luck: with the popularity and expansion of the OpenType font format, designers can now offer glyph-packed type families that make our jobs 10x easier. Distinctive initials, terminals, and ligatures can add that extra touch of flair and personality that our brand designs require. Throughout this article, I’ll share a few examples of how these special OpenType features can facilitate the branding process. But first: a little OpenType history.<\/p>

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>

<\/span>OpenType History, AKA The Font Wars<\/span><\/h2>

When Adobe launched PostScript<\/a> in 1984, it was pretty revolutionary: we were used to bitmap fonts that pixelated whenever they expanded. For reference, here’s what you’d have to work with:<\/p>

\"\"
Some of the fonts available in the original Apple Macintosh. Designs by Susan Kare<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>

These raster fonts simply couldn’t scale, so Adobe created PostScript code that interpreted letters as outlines “drawn” with math formulas, instead of those flat pixels. Shortly after, Apple’s LaserWriter became the world’s first printer<\/a> to use PostScript. All of a sudden we could shrink and expand text that printed beautifully on paper! I know that doesn’t sound huge now, but just imagine what a designer’s workflow looked like before that.<\/p>

In 1991, when launching System 7, Apple Computer designed and rolled out the font format we know as TrueType. Efficient, scalable, and extensible, the format quickly called Microsoft’s attention to the point that they licensed it<\/a> for Windows 3.1 (1992).<\/p>

But this is where it gets messy: Apple started to evolve the TrueType format (TrueType GX) for Mac-only applications and Microsoft clearly couldn’t stay behind. File extensions were different (remember .FFIL, anyone?), fonts that worked on one operating system were useless in the next, and whatever improvements were made couldn’t be directly implemented for everyone. This led to a font war<\/em> of sorts.<\/p>

You had brands creating rasterizers to render these fonts on different screens, operating systems managing font files differently, and software reading these fonts in various ways. Nothing short of a typography nightmare. And that’s when Microsoft developed TrueType Open.<\/em><\/p>

<\/span>OpenType is Born<\/span><\/h2>

So, to recap: the year is 1996 and the design world is familiar with 2 main font technologies: PostScript (Type 1) and TrueType. Seeing the strengths of PostScript Type 1, the need to have more control over how fonts evolved, and the possibilities of TrueType Open version 1, Microsoft joined forces with Adobe Systems to develop TrueType Open version 2, also known as OpenType<\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>

This brand new format brought many different benefits:<\/p>