zlacker

>>davidb+(OP)
I like everything about this! Font families seem like an incredible idea that I'm surprised nobody's done before, variable fonts are new to me and super interesting, textural healing seems like a huge step forward, and damn if that isn't one of the smoothest sites I've ever played with. Nice work!

>>itisha+ln
> Font families seem like an incredible idea that I'm surprised nobody's done before

Oh this has been done for decades. Metafont (by the inimitable Don Knuth) let you describe glyphs as toolpaths in code. You could have as many parameters as you wanted; I've seen examples where a sans-serif is smoothly swept into a serif.

Metafont never got adopted as much as I would have hoped; the lack of a graphical editor and some impedance mismatch with OpenType probably prevented its wider adoption.

>>thrtyt+vo
Also, according to Don Knuth himself: "Asking an artist to become enough of a mathematician to understand how to write a font with 60 parameters is too much".

>>GuB-42+wL
More like, asking a mathematician to become enough of a typographer to design a font that looks clean and consistent and actually aids reading is too much.

Real typographers know that the Computer Modern family is garbage.