Interpolation is not just something that happens at the end of a project. As a designer you need to see the effects of a change immediately. Especially when working in increasingly complex designspaces. Skateboard is a new tool for RoboFont 3.3+. It crunches your designspaces, offers easy access to masters and lets you dial up previews and instances. Navigate through complex designspaces, see what you’re doing.

Introducing Skateboard for RoboFont

The Skateboard window offers an overview of all the important data: which UFOs and layers are part of the interpolation system, which designspace locations are relevant and a location for the current preview.

The main Skateboard window. From top to bottom: the source UFOs and layers, then current preview location with the controls for connecting an axis to a motion. Bottom: a list of all relevant locations in this designspace. That can be masters and instances, but also locations that might need a master and locations that you mark as interesting.

Skateboard release history
Read more about the differences between Skateboard and Superpolator

Showing the MutatorSans project, this window shows the designspace has 4 masters, with additional material coming from 3 separate layers. Icons indicate which UFOs happen to be open in RoboFont, which are on disk. Missing UFOs are marked. The other UFOs are just quietly contributing their material: so you only need to have the UFO’s open that you need to edit and still see the previews. The source marked with the star is the default master.

With a designspace open, Skateboard draws a live preview in all the relevant glyph windows. Using the Navigator tool from the toolbar you can quickly move between different locations. In the Preview axes panel you can assign axes to horizontal and vertical dragging motion. Skateboard just moves the axes that you want, no need for complex multi-dimensional UI. I’ve tried bunches of different visualisation methods for these designspaces, and simpler really is better. Normal macOS input devices are two dimensional. 3D views are exponentially more complex and calculation-heavy and still won’t help you with all the other axes. So Skateboard goes for fast and practical. You’ll love it when you use it.

Skateboard neatly taps into RoboFont’s own measure tool.

Features

• RoboFont 3.3+. Skateboard will not be released for earlier versions of RF
• UFO3 only
• Generate selected instances
• Generate preview UFO for the current coordinates
• Live previews in glyph window
• Line Preview window
• Space Window, an interactive projection of the designspace
• Switch between Varlib, Variable Fonts and MutatorMath, Superpolator interpolation models. Varlib handles intermediate, non-aligned support masters better. MutatorMath can extrapolate.
• Some complicated support and layering stuff that is very exciting for a very small group of people

Designspace rules for conditional substitution are executed in the line preview.

Development

This variable font thing is pretty new. There are no tools that can do everything because there is no idea what the everything is. So expect Skateboard to continue to develop. Updates flow to your RoboFont through RoboFontMechanic2.

Pricing

Skateboard release history