One File, Full Family: Grilli Type on Variable Fonts
Scaling type has always created friction. Moving a font from a business card to a billboard alters the spatial relationship between letters, often demanding near-invisible tweaks to kerning and tracking to keep copy legible. Historically, maintaining those distinct weights and optical styles required a collection of separate files, adding asset weight and complexity for developers.
Variable fonts aim to dissolve that problem by packing an entire type family into a single, manipulable file. Instead of loading multiple static weights, designers can use a series of axes to fine-tune optical size, weight, slant, or even animate between extremes. This has made them a strong fit for expressive web design, where a brand's typography can shift from quiet to bold on hover or subtly "breathe" to create a rhythm across a page.
To understand how this format is changing both design practice and web experiences, we spoke with Thierry Blancpain, co-founder of the independent foundry Grilli Type, which has pushed these boundaries with typefaces like GT Flexa and GT Planar. Grilli Type was an early proponent of variable fonts and lobbied for their support in Figma's design tooling.
New Tools for the Standard Format
For Blancpain, the wide adoption of variable fonts was inevitable. "First of all, it's the new standard format," he explains. He argues that when core design tools fail to support these industry standards, it forces users into endless workarounds, especially in separating design and development roles.
The functional payoff is immediate: a single file that serves an entire family means fewer assets to manage and cleaner code for developers to update without worrying about font versioning or mismatched styles.
Blancpain admits a balance is required. Developers appreciate managing one file, while designers get to fine-tune optical sizes or apply "fun effects" to a font like GT Maru Mega, using its exuberant style at small sizes without losing readability. Variable fonts also point toward a future of motion online. "A purely static site often feels very old school nowadays," Blancpain says, envisioning type that responds and animates as users interact.
Designing Systems, Not Just Typefaces
Grilli Type expects the variable format to shift the industry’s vocabulary from static objects to adaptive systems. Traditional type design typically resolves on a single weight axis, with the user receiving fixed instances. Grilli Type's approach instead treats variable fonts as an interactive "design space," allowing users to pick a distinct weight or slant that fits their brand, rather than settling for "exactly that width, or exactly that weight."
This philosophy extends into their development process, which can take months or years per typeface. For GT Planar, for instance, the team worked with designer Dominik Huber through dozens or hundreds of iterative rounds to ensure one specific, clear concept acts as the foundry’s distinctive voice across all angles.
This provides advantages to specific user groups, according to Blancpain: "You get a design space. You can pick whatever fits in that design space for your brand." It's an ongoing partnership between designer and tool, making every user potentially a type designer — a space in which Blancpain sees brands reclaiming intuitive control of their typography.
Returning to Optical Sizes
Blancpain likens the rise of variable fonts to a correction to a century-old practice. Historical type cutters manually adjusted metal type (even the lowercase ‘a') depending on the final printed size, optimizing characters bit by bit for legibility. Early digital fonts abandoned this painstaking optical optimization for single-size versions.
That's why variable fonts' ability to handle optical sizing from within one file is fundamental, Blancpain contends: "We're getting tools to effectively make type that translates one-to-one to legibility and accessibility for the end user."
The result is not just a way to get a slightly more precise glyph, but a more user-centric, accessible web overall. In Blancpain's eyes, the technology depends on thoughtful designers. "If the type is more appropriate for the end user," he says, "their reading and browsing experience is going to be better automatically." For him, the future of reading on the web hinges on such empowered decisions, opening rich questions for years to come — for brand, for consumers, better tools always mean better chances to make meaningful choices.
