Interface started out in late 2016 as an experiment to build a perfectly pixel–fitting font at a specific small size (11px.) The idea was that by crafting a font in a particular way, with a particular coordinate system (Units Per EM), and for a particular target rasterization size (11), it would be possible to get the best of both sharpness and readability.
However after a few months of using an early version of Interface, it dawned on everyone exposed to the test that this approach had some serious real–world problems. Most notably that it was really hard to read longer text. Because of the pixel–aligning nature of that approach, the font took an almost mono–spaced appearance, making it really easy to read numbers, punctuation and very short words, but eye–straining to read anything longer.
The project was rebooted with a different approach, sticking with the specific UPM, but crafting glyphs and kerning in a way that made for more variation in the rhythm and smoother vertical and horizontal stems. As Interface was being developed, it was tested on an internal version ofFigma—where the author of Interface works as a designer—and slowly improved upon based on experience and feedback.
Interface works great for English–language text, and pretty well for other Latin and Cyrillic languages. There's still a lot of work to be done, and contributions are warmly welcomed. The playground contains a lot of samples, including some common non English–language words in the playground.
Please refer to the glyph repertoire for an overview of currently–available glyphs and their quality.
- Some glyphs looks just like Roboto, is this typeface based on Roboto?
- Since this font is very similar to Roboto, glyph outlines from Roboto are indeed being used, mainly as "placeholders" while the glyph set is expanded. The Roboto license can be found in the source directory.
- There's another font family with a similar name (InterFace). How do I make sure I'm talking about the right font?
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The world is a small place and just like all theEric Ericksons,
name alone somtimes does not suffice for unambiguous identity.
The best way to be clear about what font you are talking about is to
use the URL of this page (
rsms.me/interface
) when telling people about it.Design tools and other software usesa set of information embedded into every font for identity, so names are only important for humans, not computers, and so you need not to worry about "conflicts." At least not with well-behaved software. - Can I help with improving Interface?
- Yes you can! Interface is an open–source project, meaning the source code—or "source design" if you will—that is used to build the font files are freely available to improve upon. Font making requires a fair bit of technical work and depending on what you'd like to do, some things might be more fun depending on your technical skills. The "Contributing" document is a great place to start. The document outlines where you can have the biggest impact, how things are setup and how to get started.
- This website claims work started in 2016, but the git repository's log says it started later?
- Interface was developed in an a private, internal git repository starting in November 2016, prior to being published on August 22, 2017. Between November 2016 and August 2017, there were 2 990 150 line edits made across 247 versions. The reason the public github repository does not reflect this is the fact that the project was initially only internal at the company where the author works and had some sensitive information "checked in", like AWS server details and internal author identity in all commit messages. Maybe one day we can write an elaborate git filter-branch program and convert the filter the old repository to make it public, but what would be the point of that? :—)
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I've made a cool thing that uses Interface, can I share it with you?
or - I have a different question
- Reach out on Twitter (@rsms) or over email