The color font wars, ten years on
In 2013, four companies each decided the same thing: OpenType needed color. They each decided it differently.
Apple shipped sbix — PNG bitmaps locked to a pixel size, the format behind the original iPhone emoji. Google shipped CBDT/CBLC — also bitmaps, also PNG, but with size-table machinery borrowed from the old monochrome strike system. Microsoft and Adobe went vector, in opposite directions: Microsoft proposed COLR, a palette of layered outlines; Adobe and Mozilla proposed SVG-in-OpenType, full SVG documents embedded inside the font.
That last pairing felt like it had the momentum. Photoshop CC 2017 shipped the first commercial OT-SVG release, Trajan Color Concept. Type With Pride’s Gilbert typeface, the rainbow tribute to Gilbert Baker, launched in April 2017 and put OT-SVG on the front page of every design magazine. SVG was richer, more expressive, more obviously “the right answer.” For a while in the late 2010s, COLR’s spare palette-and-layers architecture looked like the budget option.
Then the numbers arrived.
COLRv1 — the joint Google and Microsoft revision, shipping in OpenType 1.9 in 2021 — added the pieces that had made COLR feel limited: gradients, blend modes, transforms, a full paint-tree model. Chrome 98 shipped it in February 2022, driven by Dominik Röttsches. Edge followed via Chromium. Firefox 107 in November 2022. And the file size argument was decisive: the full Noto Emoji set as CBDT weighs 9 MB. The same set as COLRv1 with WOFF2 compression weighs 1.85 MB. That is roughly a fivefold reduction — the kind of number that ends arguments.
Roel Nieskens, who had been among OT-SVG’s advocates, put it plainly:
“I used to say the OpenType-SVG format was the best… until I realized this is just too complex for a low-level job like text rendering. … So I switched sides to COLR.”
The thing the “COLRv1 won” headline got wrong is that OT-SVG didn’t lose. It just lost that fight. Safari still renders it. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign still author with it. The split as of late 2026 is COLRv1 across Chromium and Firefox, OT-SVG across Safari and Adobe’s apps. One-format-fits-all remains aspirational.
For anyone designing a color font today, the practical conclusion is unglamorous: know your target. A web display face bound for Chromium browsers should start with COLRv1 and a monochrome fallback. If the same face needs to work in Adobe apps or on Safari, the SVG table still earns its place. The four-format argument from 2013 did not resolve into a winner. It resolved into a division of labour.