#btconf Düsseldorf, Germany 17 - 18 Apr 2023

Tobias Kunisch

Tobias is working on making type and typography accessible and available to everyone, everywhere as Design Lead for Google Fonts.

After co-founding Google Fonts as a 20% project in 2010, he also worked on other projects like Material Design and the Google Store before returning to the team.

As a web designer in the early 2000s he lived through the browser wars, converted from spacer GIFs to CSS layouts and discovered webfonts with @font-face. Since then he's been passionate about making the web more diverse, localised and beautiful by making typography something that everyone has access to. He's lived and worked in London, New York and San Francisco and has recently returned to face Berlin's long and grey winters.

Prefer to watch this video on YouTube directly? This way, please.

Typography for Everyone

There was a time in the early ages of the internet when web designers would embed little flash files into their website for each heading in their layout. They did this to be able to embed and use typefaces other than the few fonts that were considered “web safe”.

Since then a lot has changed on the internet. These days designers and developers have lots of choice when selecting type for their projects.

As one of the co-founders of Google Fonts, Tobias believes that open source fonts are an important way in which we can provide access to typography for anyone designing and building things on the internet. Especially in regions of the world that don’t use the latin alphabet.

New technologies like variable fonts are changing type to be more like software and will open up entirely new possibilities in digital spaces.