Richard Rutter

Web typography is experiencing its biggest surge since the arrival of web fonts. We sat down with web typography evangelist Richard Rutter to talk about his book on the subject, the potential of variable fonts and how good typography induces a good mood

- Oliver Lindberg

Typography on the web has come a long way. About a decade ago it was still woefully underused and done very poorly. Text wasn’t very readable online and the same typefaces were used over and over again. People were throwing their hands in the air, claiming you couldn’t do typography on the web well. But there’s one man that has been trying to convince people otherwise and that man is Richard Rutter, co-founder of influential UX consultancy Clearleft. Now there’s a real surge of excitement about web typography and he’s at the centre of it.

One of the biggest game changers right now is the advent of variable fonts, a technology that enables a single font file to behave like multiple fonts. “It’s really interesting how quickly this has come out of nowhere,” Rutter explains. “Adobe, Microsoft, Apple and Google have all thrown their collective weight behind variable fonts and they all have their slightly different reasons. Google’s in particular will be one of performance because you can save an awful lot of space. If you deal with Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages in particular, font files will be a few megabytes in size as opposed to Latin-based font files, which are much smaller. You can radically cut down the size of these files because you can have a regular and a bold wrapped up together. You’ve just got one font file for an infinite number of variations. It’s also going to be really interesting to see how type designers will provide stylistic variations in their fonts, that are really unusual and that we wouldn’t have seen before.”