Color fonts: the next big thing? A FontLab tutorial
Back in 2014, color fonts were a brand new frontier. This 103-minute tutorial with Adam Twardoch was one of the first deep dives into how to actually make them.
It covers technical standards, font editor workflows, and the promise of full-color type right when emoji and display typography were pushing the format into the mainstream.
Traditional fonts render in a single color chosen by the app. Color fonts break that rule. They embed layered outlines, bitmaps, or SVG artwork directly in the font file. This lets a single glyph display multiple colors, gradients, or photographic detail.
This tutorial walks through the color font formats available at the time:
- Apple’s
sbix - Microsoft’s
COLR/CPAL - Google and Mozilla’s SVG-in-OpenType
- Adobe and Mozilla’s OpenType-SVG
It explains how browsers and operating systems supported them. You’ll also see a demonstration of building color glyphs inside FontLab Studio. Adam covers fallback outlines for older environments, file size trade-offs, and the tooling landscape of the era.
Watching it now serves as a great historical document. Many of the format conflicts described here eventually resolved in favor of COLR/CPAL and later COLRv1. Tooling has matured a lot since then. But the design thinking behind color glyph construction remains directly relevant today.
Watch the full video on FontLab TV.