I worked on Google Fonts, and you’d be incredibly surprised how few people run the entire service. If I recall correctly, ether ratio is something like one Google Fonts team member is responsible for the equivalent opt hundreds of millions of requests a day.
The main focus they had in the variable fonts roll out was making the internet faster. The process of choosing when to/not serve variable fonts behind the scenes was oriented around the font-weight axis, so they could reduce the number of requests, and hence speed up everything from Google searches to YouTube and every other website using Google Fonts.
Sadly the UX around displaying axes isn’t straight forward. Since the Google Fonts wants to setup a conservative interface, that doesn’t result in users requesting an entire variable axes with every request, especially when it’s not being used - there needed to be more work than just showing the font’s design space on a specimen page.
There is an incredible amount of behind the scenes effort from an incredibly talented team.
I worked on Google Fonts, and you’d be incredibly surprised how few people run the entire service. If I recall correctly, ether ratio is something like one Google Fonts team member is responsible for the equivalent opt hundreds of millions of requests a day.
The main focus they had in the variable fonts roll out was making the internet faster. The process of choosing when to/not serve variable fonts behind the scenes was oriented around the font-weight axis, so they could reduce the number of requests, and hence speed up everything from Google searches to YouTube and every other website using Google Fonts.
Sadly the UX around displaying axes isn’t straight forward. Since the Google Fonts wants to setup a conservative interface, that doesn’t result in users requesting an entire variable axes with every request, especially when it’s not being used - there needed to be more work than just showing the font’s design space on a specimen page.
There is an incredible amount of behind the scenes effort from an incredibly talented team.
Huge props to each of them.