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Enthusiasm for variable fonts outpaces adoption
This first section of the Type Report highlights key findings on variable font attitudes and adoption. The data indicate that while most designers report VF usage and positive outlooks, adoption reality lags severely behind.
Have you licensed a variable font?
Perhaps the easiest way to evaluate someone’s attitude on VFs is simply to ask her whether she has bought a license to one in the past. While we take this self-reporting with considerable skepticism, it is impressive that 55.5% of designer respondents and 24.1% of enterprise respondents claim to have licensed a variable font.
As we will discover from TN sales data and Adobe Fonts usage data, these numbers are likely not accurate. Nevertheless, they indicate that font purchasers—especially designers themselves—have both an awareness of VFs and a desire to use them.
Attitudes on VFs
Asking directly, we see that almost exactly as many designers report feelings of optimism about VFs (53.2%) as claim to have licensed them (55.5%). Since self-reporting purchase behavior is very reliable, this accurate measure of attitude is perhaps why we see over-reporting of purchases. Designers are optimistic about VFs and want to think they use them. Single-digit percentages of designers feeling pessimistic is just as encouraging.
What buyers care about
When asked to select factors which contribute to font license purchasing decisions, 46% of designers ranked technical features (including VF support) in their top three considerations. Designers care about technical quality and features, even if most distributors do not think so.
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Foundries offering VFs
Foundries still believe in variable fonts. The overwhelming majority of our partners offer VFs for sale on their own foundry sites and through our catalog.
VF sales data
While 55.5% of designers say they have purchased a variable font license, our own data suggest slower adoption, with VFs accounting for only 0.8% of new font licenses.
Why would this number be lower than comparable numbers from Adobe Fonts? Price. Syncing from Adobe Fonts is included in a designer’s Creative Cloud subscription, while purchasing a license for a VF from a distributor—whether static or variable—carries a fee. In exchange for the fee, the purchaser receives broader rights, different uses, and no expiration date (in the case of desktop licenses).
Why would price disproportionately affect VFs? Price, again. While having a price at all affects license purchases versus syncs, VFs’ higher prices—closer in total to whole type families—limits adoption. Many designers, when purchasing a license, are particular about the styles they need and do not necessarily care that a VF includes all the styles of a family, as well as the limitless styles in between.
VFs as a portion of total syncs and total fonts on Adobe Fonts
Type Network manages many of our partner foundries’ participation on Adobe Fonts, the popular font syncing service. Through this, we have data about how many designers are using variable fonts.
As a percentage of total font syncs, the 1.7% total for VFs appears low at first glance; however, the percentage of partner fonts on Adobe Fonts that are VFs is 1.8%. This indicates that, within a small margin of error, designers are syncing VFs at the same rate as static fonts.
This is a promising statistic because it demonstrates that VFs are reaching parity. Whereas variable fonts previously saw lower usage than static fonts, matching their usage represents a key threshold toward wider adoption. We will continue to monitor this in subsequent usage reports from Adobe.
May 25, 2022
We’ve learned about how variables can push the reading experience, improve accessibility and readability, and redefine brands. These four videos from the online conference distill the promise of variable fonts.
VFs on the TN catalog
While 53.2% of users say they’re optimistic about variable fonts, 55.5% say they have purchased a variable font license, and VF releases have proliferated since 2021, only 0.7% of non-enterprise licenses sold by Type Network in the last year were for VFs, accounting for only 0.3% of overall revenue.