Adam Twardoch is President of Fontlab Ltd. His blog posts are editorial pieces, Made with FontLab stories, interviews, essays, and posts that are less about one product than about type design, tools, and the people using them.
In 2013, color OpenType looked like a standards argument with four exits. Apple had sbix. Google had CBDT/CBLC. Microsoft had COLR/CPAL. Adobe and Mozilla had SVG-in-OpenType. The question then was which proposal would win. In 2026, the answer is less tidy and more useful: they all became real OpenType color font formats, but they did not become equally useful everywhere.
Scannerlicker is Fábio Duarte Martins’s foundry, and his testimonial is one of the few that actually names the FontLab features doing the work. It is, accidentally, a short manual on what to learn first.
Acqua Aldina is a variable serif drawn by hand. Baker Street 221B is a three-font Sherlockian set with a font for the detective, the doctor, and the housekeeper. Yuri Gordon’s catalogue does not pretend to fit one mood, and he’s open about why FontLab works for the spread.
Vexy Lines is not a font tool. It is a vector generator that happens to play unusually well with type-design tools.
Science Gothic is a four-axis variable font drawn by Thomas Phinney, Brandon Buerkle, and Vassil Kateliev. The fact that it exists at all — full Latin coverage, four axes, a real production pipeline — is partly because Kateliev wrote the toolkit that did the heavy lifting.
Type designers, like every healthy craft community, love a good debate. The forums where they gather — TypeDrawers, r/typography, the various national mailing lists — are full of long, careful, generously-argued threads about exactly the kind of detail that makes a difference at 9pt.
Graduate is the kind of variable font that makes the case for the format without having to argue. Slab to sans, light to black, all in one file. Eduardo Tunni drew it in FontLab.
If you’ve read a comic in the last twenty years, you’ve read Blambot. Nate Piekos’s foundry has supplied the lettering fonts for an absurd share of the medium — the dialogue balloons, the SFX, the display titles. Five of his Blambot families sit in the public made-with-fontlab gallery, all drawn in FontLab 7.
Bananas is a casual brush face that is mostly an excuse to grin while you set it. Ronaldson Pro is a 19th-century revival that took years to draw and exists because Patrick Griffin would not let the original die. Both are Canada Type. Both came out of FontLab.
Bodoni Casale is not a Bodoni revival in the careful, museum-conservator sense. It’s three Bodoni revivals — Casale, Ferrara, Terracina — each a different printed source, each digitised at the level of detail that only matters when somebody looks at the page from six inches away. That’s the California Type Foundry house style, and Dave Lawrence does it in FontLab.
YFF Becha looks like a poster you’d find tacked behind a bar in Lviv — heavy, slightly off, deliberately so. It’s the kind of display face that does not pretend to be neutral, and it’s drawn by Alexander Kapusta at his one-person foundry, Your Font Fetish.
Letterforms are made of black shapes, but type is judged by the white around and inside them.
DTL OTMaster 7.9 adds support for variable OpenType fonts. This includes the fvar, gvar, CFF2, STAT, HVAR, and MVAR tables. It includes a new Proofing Tool for printing and exporting PDF specimens, and a Side-by-Side Viewer that shows variation instances.
Available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. A full license is US$228. Upgrades from previous versions are US$57.
On March 11, 2014, FontLab hosted a webinar on Roman capital letterforms and their origins in flat-brush writing. Sign painter and type designer John Downer presented alongside calligrapher Paul Herrera.
In February 2014, FontLab hosted a live webinar with Matthew Carter, a key figure in digital type design.