Exploring Textured Fonts
What Are Textured Fonts?
They're the next big trend in graphic design. These fonts add lots of colors, shades, textures, and see-through effects to letters. They put together vector shapes and pictures into the font files, making letters look really cool and detailed.
Textured fonts are transforming digital typography by introducing complex visual elements into font files. With advancements in font technology, textured fonts are now accessible to a wide audience of designers, enriching their creative projects with unique graphic details.
Textured fonts can enhance all kinds of text because they can include any kind of character, like emojis and icons, making them versatile for various design uses.
Textured fonts, also accurately called chromatic fonts, can range from multi-colored and shaded to single-tone designs, encompassing a variety of visual styles within font files, including characters of different colors and textures.
What's Inside Textured Fonts?
A textured font file is essentially a standard font file but includes extra data for displaying more than just the character outlines—think textures and depth. Traditionally stored as SVG data within OpenType formats, these files can incorporate color, gradients, and even pictures, leading to a rich variety of font styles known as OpenType-SVG fonts. Though it sounds straightforward, the reality is much more nuanced, with a rich history behind the development of these advanced fonts.
The OpenType-SVG font format, a collaborative creation by Mozilla & Adobe, was standardized in early 2016 with support from major tech companies like Microsoft & Google, making it the industry standard for textured fonts. This format, alongside others developed by Apple and various companies for emojis and specialized uses in gaming, video, or print, supports intricate graphic details within fonts. There are four main formats: SBIX, COLR, CBDT, and SVG, each with unique features:
The design world is currently navigating through a phase of adjustment because of the various and incompatible formats for textured fonts, necessitating the use of multiple font formats to achieve compatibility across different operating systems, browsers, and applications. This transitional period is marked by efforts to ensure that designs remain consistent and accessible on all platforms.
OpenType-SVG is well-positioned to become the preferred standard for textured fonts, thanks to its support across major platforms including Windows 11, macOS Sonoma, and iOS 17. This widespread adoption suggests a promising future for OpenType-SVG in achieving uniformity in digital typography.
To address compatibility issues with older software, textured fonts can incorporate alternate vector shape data as a fallback. This ensures that if the software doesn't support the embedded textured formats, the fonts will still display properly using basic vector shapes.
Where's The Catch?
What about file size?
A textured font file tends to be bulkier than a standard font file, especially when it includes high-resolution textures or images.
Typically, fonts are quite light, ranging from a few tens to several hundred kilobytes. However, textured vector fonts might span from several hundred kilobytes to a few megabytes, influenced by their design intricacy.
Textured bitmap fonts can vary significantly in size, from a few megabytes to several tens of megabytes, with file sizes expanding as more textured font formats are combined into one file.
*Please be aware that the textured font file, whether it is a BITMAP font or an SVG color textured font, has a large size.
And regarding text scalability?
That's an important point! Textured fonts that use vector-based graphics scale flawlessly without any quality loss, just like traditional vector fonts.
Textured bitmap fonts, similar to any photo or pixel-based image, will scale correctly up to a specific size based on their original resolution. If you go beyond that size, the text will start to look pixelated.
So, whether you're printing text with a textured bitmap font or displaying it on high-resolution screens, it's necessary to determine the maximum size it can scale to without losing quality.
Given the varied uses of textured bitmap fonts, from web to print, designers will need multiple versions of the font files. This includes full-size images for desktop editing and downscaled versions for web use, ensuring optimal display across different mediums.
Where Can They Be Used?
With OpenType-SVG now established as the industry standard, there's a strong likelihood you can begin integrating textured fonts into your preferred software and hardware.
We continually update a list of apps and browsers that support textured fonts. Here's the current status:
🟢 Yes, textured fonts are supported
🟠 Yes, but with some limitations
🔴 No, textured fonts aren't supported
When you open the TEXTURED font file it looks like this:
1. On Mac:
2. On Windows:
How to Install Textured Fonts:
Where Can I Find Textured Fonts?
Best place to find the latest textured fonts is here, www.texturedfonts.com. Our collection boasts more than 160 textured fonts, and we're tirelessly working to grow this number by continuously introducing fresh and innovative options.
! Please make sure your software and machine accepts these formats prior to purchase.
!! Digital items aren't eligible for returns or exchanges because of the nature of these items.
!!! These are instant download files and as we can't retrieve the files, we can't refund after purchase.
!!!! Please read the LICENSE