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Inside Kinetic Type: drawing a variable face
From the first napkin sketch to a two-axis variable font, the full story behind our first typeface.

From the first napkin sketch to a two-axis variable font, the full story behind our first typeface. We learned most of this the hard way, by shipping, listening to buyers and rewriting our own files more times than we’d like to admit.
Start with the system, not the screen
Every product we sell begins as a small set of decisions: a spacing scale, a type ramp and a handful of color roles. Screens come later. When the foundations are right, everything built on top of them inherits that quality for free.
Make it easy to change your mind
The buyer of a template is always going to change things. Our job is to make those changes cheap: one token instead of forty hex codes, one component instead of twelve copies. That’s the whole philosophy, really.
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