Variable Font on Adobe Illustrator CC 2018

Hi,
I’m working on a Variable font with 2 axes, I have exported as separated instances, each one works perfectly, & have followed this tutorial:

to create a Variable font & I have tested on Illustrator CC 2018 & axis-praxis.org as well, but It does not work
I don’t know what is the wrong!

Archive.zip (5.4 KB)

1 Like

After quickly looking at your file, a few things stand out.

  1. You actually have 3 axes defined: Weight, Width, and Custom
  2. Weight and Custom share the same values so it appears that the Custom axis is unnecessary
  3. Even with just 2 axes, I believe you need at least 3 masters to make it work properly. For full control, you’d have 4 masters so you could define all of the extremes.
    • A 4 master set up would like like this:
      • Master 1: Light & Condensed
      • Master 2: Bold & Condensed
      • Master 3: Light & Wide
      • Master 4: Bold & Wide
    • In your case, it seems that the width axis isn’t actually necessary. As you increase weight, the letterforms naturally get wider, and so I question if your width axis isn’t extreme enough to justify it.

Thanks for your replay,
please look into the attached file “new file”,
actually, I have worked on more masters,
but even that I don’t know what is my mistakes,
I would appreciate you if you could do the corrections on the file,
Well, forgot about the design, I would like to understand the technic of creating a Variable Font.
Although It works perfectly on “Instance Slider”
thanks

MM Font.glyphs.zip (4.9 KB)

For variable fonts the masters need to be on a rectangular grid. So for the first three the width needs to be the same and for the other two too. The Bold-Condensed has the same setting than the Bold master.

So you need to do:
Thin: 9/240
SemiLight: 28/240
Bold: 80/240
Thin Condensed:9/160
SemiLight Condensed: 28/160
Bold Condensed: 80/160

You need another master to make the space rectangular.

Style names should not have hyphens.

Thanks, Georg,
that makes sense, I’m trying to do your corrections

Perfect, works fine, only 2 things:
1- Why the font width on illustrator looks like fixed
2- Why the names on FontBook does not match the names on illustrator?

Archive.zip (5.8 KB)