If you have a big negative slant, and auto cursive enabled, you get much more of a humanist sans-serif, versus a neo-grotesque without those parameters. That's a huge amount of character to build into one single font.
And the absolute max size for the font is 281kb, and a more pared down version is about 100kb. Yes, I know, you'll protest, page bloat! But if I wanted to use a non-variable font, each individual font would be around 20kb, so if I needed a pretty typical stack of 300-400-600 font weights, with matching italics, I'm looking at 120kb, with individual requests for each weight.
Thanks, it has been a fun project to work on, and you are correct about variable fonts offering more range in fewer bytes!
Another thing worth considering in a “page bloat” debate is that while a very extensive variable font is maybe 300 kb, that size is fairly average for a JPEG, but you can do far more with a variable font.
If you have a big negative slant, and auto cursive enabled, you get much more of a humanist sans-serif, versus a neo-grotesque without those parameters. That's a huge amount of character to build into one single font.
And the absolute max size for the font is 281kb, and a more pared down version is about 100kb. Yes, I know, you'll protest, page bloat! But if I wanted to use a non-variable font, each individual font would be around 20kb, so if I needed a pretty typical stack of 300-400-600 font weights, with matching italics, I'm looking at 120kb, with individual requests for each weight.