This roundup of typography links touches on variable fonts, optical sizing, and some clever CSS techniques worth knowing about.

Variable fonts: more than just a weight slider

Mark Boulton questions the practical value of variable fonts in most projects but lands on a compelling use case: adjusting optical size for dark mode. Robin earlier covered this same idea at CSS-Tricks. Roel Nieskens offers a deeper look at optical size itself, describing it as the hidden superpower of variable fonts. His central point: this feature makes letterforms actually change shape at small versus large sizes, automatically, in the browser—no manual weight tweaking required.

Piper Haywood has updated v-fonts.com with browsable taxonomies, making the site a more useful reference for exploring what variable fonts can do if you're considering a redesign around them.

Practical font performance and selection

From a performance angle, Katie Hempenius outlines font best practices as they relate to Web Core Vitals. The essentials to internalize remain: preconnect to the font host, subset your font files, and use font-display responsibly to avoid layout shifts and long paint times.

Matej Latin takes a different approach, arguing that designers need only five well-chosen fonts in their toolkit. The idea parallels developers who stick with a core HTML/CSS/JavaScript stack and learn it deeply rather than chasing every new framework.

CSS tricks and experimental type

Lea Verou demonstrates another use for @property, this time inheriting ancestor font sizes for layout control. Registering custom properties unlocks behavior closer to what you'd expect from native properties, and she also shows how to feature-detect @property with JavaScript. If you can't use that approach, Jane offers a pure CSS workaround using some genuinely mind-bending cascade logic.

On the more whimsical end, sans bullshit sans is a project that works like the Cloud to Butt browser extension but delivers its text substitutions through ligatures—turning certain phrases into tilted Comic Sans-style badges, which raises the question of how the angular positioning is achieved.

There's also a custom SVG-based glitter text builder from whO, which uses a custom font with <text> and applies gradients plus exotic noise-blending filters for the glow effect. And for a more personal project, Jon Hicks has created a font named Bryan in memory of his father, John Bryan Hicks.