Intrinsic Typography: The Future of Typesetting

The contexts we as web creators need to manage are increasingly complex. We not only have to manage our content styling across browser widths, but also layout variations, environment, and accessibility needs. Currently, we typeset our content explicitly for each of these contexts. This paradigm has become unmanageable and inflexible to our diverse design needs. The future of typesetting is one where we can provide instructions as to how our content responds to its contexts, instead of defining contexts in which our content changes. Thus removing the need for breakpoints and viewport unit calculations, encapsulating all styles within the content style itself. So on your website, where you might have had multiple headline styles defined for home page modules, sidebars, and entry pages, multiplied by the number of breakpoints, you can instead have a single headline style that adapts itself to each of these layout and screen contexts. These tight and functional typographic systems, like design systems, simplify your codebase and provides you with flexibility to make more fluid and dynamic layouts. This talk will go over the paradigm that exists, technologies that bridge into what’s coming up like CSS Locks and Variable Fonts, and finally, go into the next generation of typesetting with tools like Typetura (disclosure I work on this) and mediums like mixed reality typography.