Color Fonts a.k.a. OpenType-SVG Color Fonts
There are many font designers and many fonts for sale everywhere on the web. Just check out places like Creative Market. We can even use free fonts from places like Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts. These sites have hundreds of fonts hosted on the web just waiting for you to use them in your projects. Just download the font to use it in your favorite design software or add a line of code to your HTML to use it on your website.
But what are these multi-colored fonts that are becoming so popular? What I am talking about is the fairly new Color Fonts, also known as Chromatic Fonts or OpenType-SVG Color Fonts. Many font designers and designer font users are very excited about these Color Fonts.
Click here to see a sampling of free color fonts.
Instead of being a font with solid-colored characters, these color fonts have characters, or glyphs, with multiple colors, textures and more. Until recently, the only way to have patterns or images inside text was to use design software to create each glyph individually and these glyphs are only vector or bitmap images. They are not live or editable. So you cannot use the text tool and you need to place each glyph manually in your design.
But that is about to change. With this new OpenType-SVG font format, the graphic data for those beautiful multi-colored glyph designs are stored inside the OpenType font file. This embedded SVG data includes the graphic information about the bitmap image, colored vector shapes, textures or whatever else is part of the design. Although the OpenType-SVG format is now an industry standard, these color fonts are not yet widely supported. But that will change quickly. This site (www.colorfonts.wtf) maintains an updated list of software and web browsers that are ready for OpenType-SVG fonts.
To use color fonts in design software, such as Photoshop and Illustrator, just install them on your computer system. For example, I installed several free color fonts on my iMac using the Font Book app that is part of the macOS. Once the font is installed, it should be available in the Font Family drop-down menu in your designer software. If your software does not support color fonts, you will see the fall back black glyphs.
You can also use OpenType-SVG Color Fonts on your website. The easiest way is to use a site like Adobe Fonts, which has three free color fonts available at this time. You can download several free color fonts from the websites listed below.
Adobe Fonts
Gilbert and Gilbert Color by Hayato Yamasaki, Kazunori Shiina, and Robyn Makinson. From Fontself.
Utopian One Color and Utopian Two Color by Alejandro Paul and Alex Trochut. From Sudtipos.
https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/gilbert
https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/utopian
Type With Pride Project
Download Gilbert by the Type With Pride Project
https://www.typewithpride.com/
Fontself #ColorFontWeek
Download Abelone designed by Maria Gronlund
Download Playbox designed by Matt Lyon
https://www.fontself.com/colorfontweek/2018
FontSpace
Download TALMUD BAVLI by Canona
Download ColorTube by Neogrey Creative
Download Multicolore Pro by Neogrey Creative
Download Fattern by Neogrey Creative
https://www.fontspace.com/category/color
Color Fonts! WTF?
https://www.colorfonts.wtf/
But what are these multi-colored fonts that are becoming so popular? What I am talking about is the fairly new Color Fonts, also known as Chromatic Fonts or OpenType-SVG Color Fonts. Many font designers and designer font users are very excited about these Color Fonts.
Click here to see a sampling of free color fonts.
Instead of being a font with solid-colored characters, these color fonts have characters, or glyphs, with multiple colors, textures and more. Until recently, the only way to have patterns or images inside text was to use design software to create each glyph individually and these glyphs are only vector or bitmap images. They are not live or editable. So you cannot use the text tool and you need to place each glyph manually in your design.
But that is about to change. With this new OpenType-SVG font format, the graphic data for those beautiful multi-colored glyph designs are stored inside the OpenType font file. This embedded SVG data includes the graphic information about the bitmap image, colored vector shapes, textures or whatever else is part of the design. Although the OpenType-SVG format is now an industry standard, these color fonts are not yet widely supported. But that will change quickly. This site (www.colorfonts.wtf) maintains an updated list of software and web browsers that are ready for OpenType-SVG fonts.
To use color fonts in design software, such as Photoshop and Illustrator, just install them on your computer system. For example, I installed several free color fonts on my iMac using the Font Book app that is part of the macOS. Once the font is installed, it should be available in the Font Family drop-down menu in your designer software. If your software does not support color fonts, you will see the fall back black glyphs.
You can also use OpenType-SVG Color Fonts on your website. The easiest way is to use a site like Adobe Fonts, which has three free color fonts available at this time. You can download several free color fonts from the websites listed below.
Adobe Fonts
Gilbert and Gilbert Color by Hayato Yamasaki, Kazunori Shiina, and Robyn Makinson. From Fontself.
Utopian One Color and Utopian Two Color by Alejandro Paul and Alex Trochut. From Sudtipos.
https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/gilbert
https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/utopian
Type With Pride Project
Download Gilbert by the Type With Pride Project
https://www.typewithpride.com/
Fontself #ColorFontWeek
Download Abelone designed by Maria Gronlund
Download Playbox designed by Matt Lyon
https://www.fontself.com/colorfontweek/2018
FontSpace
Download TALMUD BAVLI by Canona
Download ColorTube by Neogrey Creative
Download Multicolore Pro by Neogrey Creative
Download Fattern by Neogrey Creative
https://www.fontspace.com/category/color
Color Fonts! WTF?
https://www.colorfonts.wtf/
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