Just Your Type

It’s possible to chart the evolution of the internet through the development of typography — from the early days when users went wild with limited default fonts, through the era of increasing standardization and cohesion, to today’s return to bespoke personalization. This essay explores how Google’s expansion of font possibilities, largelly due to the breakthrough invention of variable fonts, can bring back some of the fun things we miss about the Comic Sans era — with a little less chaos and a lot more accessibility.

Today, Web 1.0 seems like a bygone era. The pre-social media internet of the 1990s was characterized by idiosyncratic and wonky sites, with a bespoke, user-centric quality and the messiness of a scrapbook — thanks in large part to the available font selection (or lack thereof).

At the time, fonts considered web safe were those already installed on every individual user’s machine, so that they reliably looked the same on every operating system. This meant that most people could only use default options like the still-classic Times, Trebuchet, and Verdana. Creativity finds a way, however, and even these basics offered a degree of experimentation, especially when people employed color. Think of stark acid-green text on a purple background — great for a Geocities fan site, bad for a sustained reading experience.

Web design, specifically when it comes to fonts, has come a long way since those early days of the internet. Font restrictions eased up around 2009-2010 with the arrival of web fonts, supported by increased browser capability, making web-safe fonts unnecessary. While font possibilities have expanded, so has the need to streamline accessible and usable design — everyone should have access to the text on the page.

The early 2010s offered increasingly consolidated, cohesive, and modern design languages — like Apple’s flat iOS 7, Twitter’s 2012 web refresh, and Material’s launch in 2013. These systems began to establish standards in order to unify user experiences across platforms and products. Yet designers at Google were aware that these standards can risk sameness and conformity, and lose the beloved idiosyncratic or vernacular qualities endemic to the early web. So what’s a web designer with personality to do?

After the whimsy of Web 1.0, the early 2000s signaled Web 2.0’s shift to a more uniform structure and aesthetic. By the time that social media and mobile devices were introduced in the mid-2000s, designers started to bake best practices into platforms. These best practices included embracing minimalism and white space — a shift made possible by developments like responsive web design. Meanwhile, the widespread availability of web fonts melted previous restrictions away, and LED screen technology allowed for svelte, streamlined letterforms with subtler contrasts.

Google Fonts’ launch in 2010, which included a set of 18 open-source fonts, helped concretize intentional, accessible design at Google and beyond. Tobias Kunisch, co-founder of Google Fonts, says: “It was important to us to remove any barriers of entrance for good typography on the web. Back then free fonts tended to be low quality, and we wanted to change that.”

The 2014 introduction of Material 1 was driven by a keen understanding of surfaces communicated through light and shadow, with elegant and readable fonts. But even with a library of deeply considered fonts available to all, the fonts were still static, and options were largely limited to presets. In 2016, variable fonts showed a way forward.