Google has announced that it is incorporating its first batch of color fonts to Google Fontsits veteran service that allows website designers and developers to choose from a variety of fonts from the catalog to use in their projects without the need to include the desired font files on the servers themselves.
For those who want direct access to these fonts, Google has also incorporated a new filter within the Google Fonts search function.
Color fonts, also known as chromatic fonts, as opposed to regular fonts or typefaces, also known as colorless fonts, which only specify where the color goes, they are an evolution of the same by integrating specifications for colors, gradients, textures and transparencies, among others, into the font files, whether the fonts are in vector format or in bitmap format.
Google says that while we may not have heard of this variety of font types, color fonts, even though they’ve been standard with us for a few years now, las we are using daily, pointing to emojis as an example of this and add that:
Emoji is the most obvious use case for color fonts, but type designers use this technology to create highly expressive and customizable typefaces, especially in the newer format, COLRv1.
They explain that have opted for COLRv1, pointing out that it is a binary vector format, where, unlike the original color sources, based on bitmaps, they can be scaled without losing quality in the process, or what is the same, they will not be pixelated.
This feature is more than interesting to achieve visually more elegant websites, which is what is pursued, and that can also be used in responsive designs that allow it to adapt to different types of screen without losing quality.
Regarding COLRv1, capabilities such as the possible use of multiple gradients stand out, for allowing multiple color palette options to be included in the source from the CSS style sheet, for the possibility of customizing the color palettes in the CSS style sheets, and even there is the possibility of adding variable axes, where all these qualities They offer endless customization possibilities.
Part of the new color fonts are focused on supporting the Arabic alphabet, although they are also compatible with the Latin alphabet, there are others that are also interesting such as Noto Color Emoji, Bungee Spice and Nabla.
About Noto Color Emoji they point out that:
Last spring we introduced Noto Emoji, a variable monochrome version of Noto Color Emoji. And now the chromatic version is also available on fonts.google. Coinciding with the new Unicode 15.0 update, this release includes 21 new characters, bringing us to a total of 3,664 emoji! Thanks to COLRv1, you can customize them all.
More information: Material.io (Google)
