Humane
Humane is a technology startup founded by designers, innovators, and inventors Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri. Humane commissioned Production Type to design exclusive, bespoke variable fonts to create a unique brand identity and ensure optimal user experience across various devices and contexts.
- Client
Humane, 2023.
- Team
Hugues Gentile, Marion Sendral, Arthur Schwarz, Mick Duggan.
- Creative direction
Paul Miller
Humane is opening the post-smartphone era. As the company building the first AI hardware and services platform, Humane wanted a typeface true to its core values. Newly equipped with custom variable fonts, Humane is provided with adaptability, performance optimization, and creative freedom, enhancing their products’ overall design and functionality.
Custom Type for Enhanced Design and Functionality
For Humane, Production Type developed a geometric sans-serif typeface called… “Humane”. The dynamic typeface Humane adapts to multiple AR conditions, including ambient lighting, text-in-motion, and critical UI notifications. It also features a range of unique ligatures and alternate characters, which can be combined to create more striking typographic compositions if its discreet UI typography abilities are no longer a requirement.
The Humane variable fonts offer several advantages in the context of augmented reality (AR), which requires efficient, adaptable, and visually appealing text rendering. With this bespoke typeface, Humane product designers and engineers are able to create a wide range of typographic variations using a single font file. The fonts are particularly useful in AR environments where text may need to adapt to different user vision levels, distances, or preferences. The Humane fonts allow adjusting weight dynamically, enhancing legibility and the overall user experience.
Optimizing AR Resources with Dynamic Fonts
In AR applications, optimizing resources is essential for maintaining a smooth and responsive experience. The Humane dynamic fonts can help reduce the amount of data needed to render different font styles, as multiple variations can be generated from a single font file. This strategy can lead to faster load times, reduced memory usage, and improved overall performance in AR environments.
In a context where text often overlaps with real-world objects and environments, making it crucial to ensure that it remains clear and legible, the Humane fonts can help maintain a consistent visual experience by adjusting to different background contrasts, colors, or surface textures, enhancing readability in various conditions. Moreover, the Humane fonts enable responsive typography, allowing text to scale and adjust seamlessly to different devices or display conditions.
The creative possibilities of the Humane variable fonts are virtually endless. The fonts can offer designers greater creative freedom in AR applications, as they can experiment with a wide range of typographic styles and effects without needing multiple font files. Such an outlook can lead to more engaging and immersive experiences that take full advantage of the unique qualities of the Humane dynamic fonts.
- Font format
TrueType variable with dynamic screen optimization