Bobby Henderson

I'm accustomed to looking for overlaps when using Variable Fonts (in either Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW). It's surprising finding overlaps in static fonts (note, I've seen these overlaps in static versions of Roboto Serif and Roboto Slab as well as the sans Roboto). For most users this is not a big deal. But if you're creating lettering that will be sent to a vinyl cutter or cut out of aluminum on a computer driven routing table the overlaps can be very bad. Out of habit I'm looking at every project in outline view.

In order for Canva to compete with Adobe for professional-level graphics software users they're going to have to do so with something other than their name-sake web-based app. And it's going to take an entirely different marketing approach. If they're smart they'll leave the names of the Affinity applications unchanged and simply pour a lot of development resources into them. If they mess around applying the Canva brand name to them I think such a decision would backfire. Canva has been marketed as being creative software for people who have little or no artistic talent or technical knowledge of graphics production work flows. The Canva brand name evokes that image. It would be best if an app like Affinity Designer doesn't have a bunch of hints Canva is the overlord. Since private equity minded business guys are involved I feel certain they may put a good amount of Canva-spam inside those desktop applications. Also, it's not enough for them to use Adobe Express as a bar on where they should be reaching. If they want Designer and Photo to compete directly with Illustrator and Photoshop they need to aspire to that level.

Nearly all the commercial typefaces I've bought in the past few years have included variable versions. I just wish the introductory pricing specials at sites like MyFonts were still as good as they were before Monotype bought up everything.

I was drinking a fountain soda while reading that and almost did a spit-take. Pretty funny. While Adobe's software is geared for (and priced for) people doing creative work as a full time job Canva is not situated for that at all. Canva is a tool made for Karaoke Design. Users can just grab some pre-existing templates, pre-existing clip art and slap it together. They can quickly fake it at being an "artist." Another analogy: if a pro-level application like Adobe Illustrator is akin to a Fender Stratocaster then the Canva equivalent would be a plastic Guitar Hero video game controller with the funny colored buttons on the neck.

I'm pretty shocked and disappointed by this news. First of all, I just can't stand Canva. In my day job doing sign design work I'm dealing with an increasing amount of customer provided art made in Canva. Much of it is unusable garbage (especially the SVG files it outputs). The only thing that seems to yield art elements that can be "harvested" is its PDF for Print export filter. I'm always having to walk customers through finding the export filter in the online app. Canva is really dumbed down software. It can do some basic, rudimentary design work. Really the app just seems to be a glorified viewer of clip art and design templates. The only sort of positive thing I can say about Canva is its fonts collection is pretty impressive (especially the subscription version). Well, Monotype made a licensing deal with Canva. That explains the giant amount of fonts. BTW, Monotype sure looks like it is trying to monopolize the type industry. It's just scary how many type foundries the company has absorbed. Normally I wouldn't feel all that bad about one software developer acquiring another software company. But that's not what's really going on here. Canva got its start being bank-rolled by a couple or so private equity companies. Monotype is owned by a private equity company. These business people with the stock trader bro mindset have tunnel vision. They're only concerned about cutting costs to the bone and running any scam they can to goose the stock price if the company is publicly traded or doing other less than ethical things if the operation is all private. I just don't have a positive opinion at all of private equity firms. I've used CorelDRAW for a long time and I think that application's future is starting to look bleak -the app has been stagnating under private equity ownership since the 2000's. It's probably a lucky thing the app still exists at all. I've been wanting to see a number of new features and improvements added to Affinity Designer. But with Canva (and its private equity bosses) now in the mix my expectations are shot. These guys can promise all sorts of things to customers. But there are countless examples of how private equity firms or the private equity business mindset have hollowed out once good companies. Just look at the $#1T-show going on at Boeing. That's the private equity mindset at work right there. Boeing was more interested in cost cutting and stock buy-backs than paying any attention to quality control.

Some of us need to use multiple applications in our daily work. I currently have copies of Affinity Designer, Inkscape, CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator installed on my computer. One of the biggest reasons is being able to handle customer provided art files accurately. None of these applications have 100% feature overlap or 100% compatibility with each other. It's usually a lot easier to open an art file in its native environment than wasting time fighting with it in a rival application. Some of these applications have their own unique features as well as their own strengths and weaknesses. CorelDRAW has long been popular in the sign industry; although Illustrator has eaten into that lead via its strengths in large format digital printing. The branding work of most major companies is done using Adobe software. So we get a lot of AI and PDF files as art assets. I decided to check out Affinity Designer when Serif was having its 50% off covid pricing sale a couple years ago. I figured it might be good to have the app handy in case I started getting .afdesign files from clients. Lately though, uh, it seems like more and more client art is being generated in Canva. That's just creating more hurdles and wasted time dealing with customer provided art.

Sometimes a 1970's look is desired for certain graphics projects. Extrusion/block-shadow effects can be added for other reasons. Sometimes the effects filter works as a way to speed up the drawing process of making isometric 3D designs. One person's taste should not be a reason to keep a certain effect out of a vector drawing application. Let's face it, people do all sorts of extremely tasteless things with graphics even with the most simple of tool sets. I strongly dislike the Arial typeface, but lettering in that typeface looks especially hideous when people squeeze and stretch it out of its normal proportions. I see that all the time on poorly designed signs. But I wouldn't ask software developers to prevent users from being able to squeeze or stretch lettering. There are certain cases where being able to squeeze, stretch or shear type is necessary (certain simulated 3D drawings come to mind).

RTL text is a line composing convention, not a font format. If Serif wants Affinity Designer to be used by a lot more people globally they'll need to support Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu and other scripts. Let's not forget about vertical text used in nations like Japan. But that's a different matter than support of font formats. Variable fonts are not going away. The OTF Variable format is already far more successful than the Type 1 Multiple Master and TrueType GX formats from the 1990's. I use variable fonts frequently in my design work. Whenever I'm considering to buy a new typeface package I'll check to see if it includes any variable fonts as well as how many variable axes it includes. It's just as much a selling point as a typeface having an expanded character set with lots of OpenType features.

The OpenType Variable format is already far more successful than the Type 1 Multiple Master and TrueType GX formats were in the 1990's. When Adobe was promoting the Multiple Master format they were pretty much going it alone both in supporting the standard in applications like Illustrator and developing Multiple Master fonts. Apple was competing with its GX format. I never heard the story before of Microsoft convincing Adobe to drop the T1 MM format in order to get "Works With Windows" labels put on retail packages. I had Windows versions of Illustrator in the late 1990's that could use T1 MM fonts. A big difference with OpenType Variable is Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Google worked together on developing the new standard (this is more than just Adobe's baby). Another big difference is far more type foundries are developing and releasing OTF Variable fonts. There is even a decent number of open source Variable Fonts available for free at the Google Fonts web site. Some of them are very useful and even innovative. Check out how Kablammo "morphs" in Google Fonts' type tester. Pretty incredible. The Tilt family (Warp, Prism & Neon) has 3D-like rotation axes. It's clear the OTF Variable and OTF-SVG font formats are not going away. I'm certainly not going to stop using them in my sign design work. They solve too many geometry problems for me to be willing to live without them. But that means me using Illustrator or CorelDRAW to utilize those fonts, not Affinity Designer.

Some applications are better than others at supporting backward compatibility. Out of vector-based "drawing" programs, Adobe Illustrator (IMHO) is the best in this regard. The latest version of Illustrator can open AI & EPS files made in the very first version from the 1980's. It can down-save to any prior Creative Suite version as well as versions 10, 9, 8 and 3. Obviously certain newer features and effects will be flattened or just break when down-saved too far. But that's true for just about any graphics application. CorelDRAW isn't as good as Illustrator for backward compatibility. The last couple or so versions can't save CDR files back any farther than version X5. And they can't open or import CDR files made prior to version 6. That can be very aggravating to long time users, especially since the CDR format isn't supported by rival applications anywhere near as well as AI, EPS and PDF. It is short sighted for V2 of Affinity Designer to have no ability to down-save afdesign files to V1 format. An interchange format like EPS or PDF has to be used instead (with associated limitations) to share artwork with people still using V1. OTOH, it's not all that difficult to upgrade. Serif runs pricing specials now and then. I bought the V2 upgrade taking advantage of one of those 50% off specials.

I don't think it's a software developer's fault for people not knowing the ins and outs of exchanging files. I'm using the latest versions of Affinity Designer, Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. But if someone requests art files from me I'm not going to simply click the "save" button and blindly email him what I have. I always ask what software they're using as well as the versions of that software. Then I provide files down-saved to the versions of software they're using. I also try to be careful about using certain kinds of application-dependent effects and features in artwork if I want that artwork to be able to export to non-native environments. There are certain features I want incorporated into future releases of Affinity Designer. Support for variable fonts is very high on that list of "wants." I know good and well art files made in a future version of Affinity Designer that allow variable font use are not going to be backward compatible with older versions. That has been the reality of all vector graphics applications going back 30+ years.

I haven't seen any free variable fonts at the Font Squirrel web site. But the Google Fonts web site has a pretty good collection of free, open source variable fonts. Out of commercial sites, I like checking the MyFonts site every few days to see what is newly released as well as what else is on sale. Most of the variable fonts I've bought over the past few years were purchased when the fonts were newly released and heavily discounted. Even with the discounts they still can be kind of expensive. For instance the introductory price for Helvetica Now Variable was $199. That's for two font files. When the static version of Helvetica Now was introduced in 2019 it had a bunch of font files (in Display, Text and Micro sub-families); introductory price for that was around $100. If I had a choice between either feature I would take variable fonts capability over tagging PDFs. There is a variety of third party PDF editors that can modify PDFs after creation. Variable font capability is a pretty basic thing affecting the creative front end of the application.

I think it depends on the typeface. Most variable typefaces retain much of their style DNA regardless of what variable instance is chosen. Roboto Flex is neutral enough that it can get disguised pretty heavily with certain axis combinations. As it stands, so many people abuse standard static fonts by artificially squeezing and stretching them out of their normal proportions. That will throw off online font ID tools like MyFonts' What the Font utility. I have an intense dislike of such manual squeezing and stretching of fonts, particularly default fonts like Arial, because I see so much of it in the sign industry. It's like fingernails on a chalkboard. Another bad one is Gotham (now that so many people have gotten hold of it). The Gotham typeface itself is a great design, but it looks downright horrible when distorted. The carefully balanced monotone strokes are no longer uniform. The whole thing takes on a fun house mirror appearance. The practice of crudely distorting fonts will make any graphics layout take on an air of amateur quality. Variable fonts that sport both weight and width axes come overcome much of that nonsense if the "designers" will go through the effort of actually using the features. I have some variable typefaces whose width axis will allow it to go from ultra compressed to very wide yet still keep the horizontal and vertical stroke thicknesses naturally balanced.

Some of the variable font families available on the Google Fonts site are pretty impressive, such as Recursive, Roboto Serif and Roboto Flex. Roboto Flex has a whopping 12 variable axes. Within Google's fonts browsing page they recently added listings for the number of axes a variable font family contains. Most have just one axis (usually weight). It seems like more of the recent additions have 2 or more axes.

In the case of Inkscape, the application does indeed allow manual or numerical adjustment of variable font axis values in the Text and Font panel. But it does not provide live previews of the changes. The "apply" button has to be pressed in order to see updated changes. The panel also behaves a bit wonky (in version 1.2.2).