The Roboto typeface has grown to encompass many variations since its debut in 2011, and it most recently received a reading-optimized Serif version in February. As a significant update and Google Fonts’ largest project to date, Roboto Flex received officially unveiled today.
Roboto has a number of accolades to its name, including being the most downloaded font on Google and the Android default. It has developed over the past 11 years into a number of variations, including Roboto Sans, Condensed, Slab, Mono, and Serif.
Development of aa2. Roboto Flex is a flexible font that offers enormous customisation potential:
While express and finesse are about offering individuals a wider palette (express) and more control (finesse) over their designs, compress alludes to their file compression capabilities. A variable font’s axes, which allow individuals to select and mix any value(s) along them rather than being constrained to the few alternatives established by type designers, are what enable the express and finesse benefits.
The small distinctions between Roboto Flex at its default size (14) and the original without Roboto are as follows:
A few minor revisions to Roboto’s neo-grotesque sans design that adhere to Font Bureau’s high standards for quality include changing the default numeral style from tabular lining to proportional and keeping the % symbol’s zeros in line with conventional numeral zero design.
Another feature that stands out is the wide variety of weights and widths available across the entire stack of optical sizes. Additionally, user axes customization is available for weight, width, slant, grade, and optical sizes, with an equal Slant axis for italics.
The final seven parametric axes offered by Roboto Flex are counter width, thin stroke, lowercase height, uppercase height, ascender height, descender depth, and figure height:
What if you desire even greater discretion? What if you want to make more precise adjustments, such as boosting simply the character stroke weight or reducing the depth of your lowercase descenders? What if you want the font heights of two distinct typefaces to match? The use of parametric axes is then made.
Open-sourced Roboto Flex is now available to download in Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic on Google Fonts.
Created by Font Bureau and David Berlow and Santiago Orozco and Irene Vlachou and Ilya Ruderman and Yury Ostromentsky and officially unveiled 0
