After Effects: Animate variable fonts

I’m so excited that we can finally(!) access a huge part of the potential of variable fonts in creative animation workflows in the After Effects Beta. I’m no pro when it comes to motion design but I wanted to try out some of the variable fonts available on Adobe Fonts. After watching a couple of tutorials on ‘Text Animators’ and how powerful they can be, I got stuck in.

The key benefit to variable fonts when it comes to animations is you have access to the whole design space for a font family through different axes. Typically this is things like weight and width, beyond just the preset styles 'light, regular, bold' etc. This means you can transform the letters without having to skew them and losing the integrity of the designs (think verticals becoming too squished etc). There also are a lot of very creative variable fonts which basically have effects built-in.

I’ll run through the fonts I tried out and how I created each example. Let’s dig in!

Monday

Adapt from Supertype is an extensive and versatile sans-serif family and the Variable font gives you access to all of that in one. The animation uses scale, tracking, the variable font width axis, and weight axis. I used keyframes on the offset of the range selector with a loopOut("pingpong") expression to make it loop back. Effectively this applies the animation from left to right, letter by letter, then return again.

Tuesday

For this example I was inspired by the sample image for Lunatique Variable from PintassilgoPrints. I used the built-in Blur Glitch preset to recreate some of the styling, while animating the variable width axis with keyframes on the range offset again.

Wednesday

I was inspired by NCND Variable from LettError to create a bleeding effect as if the text had just been typed by a typewriter and was solidifying on the paper. This is all handled with the variable width axis built into the font + the ‘Blinking Cursor Typewriter Console’ preset.

Thursday

Scatterplot Variable from CAST has such a cool effect built in with its ‘random’ variable axis. Effectively the letters are all made up of dots and you can control how spread out they are, as well as the weight axis controlling their size. Animating them both at the same time, along with the color change, gives the effects of the letters appearing out of the chaos.

Friday

Friday night lights with Superscore Variable from Swell Type was created using the two built in variable axes — weight and flux. Weight changes how big the dots are, and Flux changes the variance between the dots in each letter. Here I also applied a ‘Wiggly selector’ to the text animator which effectively gives you a random effect like some old school flickering lights.

Saturday

I had a lot of fun playing with Graveur Variable from MTM for this example seeing just how many things I could do at once. The variable weight axis, blur, scale, position, opacity, and rotation are all controlled by this text animator with an easing applied to the animation to give it that snap back into place at the end.

Sunday

Obviously Variable from OH no Type Co is such a powerhouse of a variable font. I really tried to push my understanding of how to play with variable font animation here, and pretty much got it to do what I wanted. If you animate the scale larger while making the letters more condensed with the variable width axis, you can in theory make it look like the characters grow up or down. There was a bit of trial an error here about how you apply that from the right anchor point and at what rate so they stay lined up. Ideally I’ll try to do a little more tweaking so the letters don’t grow wider faster than they are getting bigger and have a more smooth vertical motion.

Hopefully these examples spark some ideas of what is possible with variable fonts, and for those of you who are more experienced with After Effects I’m excited to see how you can bring them to life even more!