Spectral is a Font That’s Interactive & Customisable

By Sia. in Graphics. Updated on June 29, 2023.

While fonts come in many forms, most, if not all of them, are usually static in design. However, fonts may soon become a lot more flexible as Google has introduced a new font type that is both customizable and interactive – called Spectral.

Developed in collaboration with Production Type and Prototypo, Spectral is Google’s first parametric font. It is designed with the principles of responsive design in mind. The result is a font that is capable of altering itself to fit in with the layout of the page it is in.

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Spectral font with minimum thickness

Spectral font with maximum thickness

Of course, technical explanations aren’t enough to sell people on the concept of parametric fonts, which is why Google has launched a demo page for the font that showcases what it could do. As the demo page shows, Spectral would allow designers to tinker with a number of aspects of the font, ranging from the aperture of the font, all the way to the curviness of the font.

Aperture differences with the Spectral font

Did the demo manage to interest you in Spectral? If so, I have some good news. Spectral is now available for free on Google Fonts, so you can download it and use it on your own machine if you wish. On top of that, Spectral is also a selectable font in some of Google’s services such as Docs, Sheets, and Slides.