On 8 February 2021 we held a one-day beginner-level workshop on interactive typography in semantic interfaces controlled by physical computing as part of the Processing Community Day 2021 @ Porto organized by the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto.

The goal of this workshop was to introduce participants to improve the user experience of graphical interfaces by creating a semantic relationship between typography and data collected by sensors.

Specifically, we showed participants the new font technology, variable fonts, how to connect sensors to the open-source board Arduino and learn the tools to synchronize the data and the typeface through HTML, CSS, and Javascript (JS).

The workshop program was (10h–13h GMT+1):

• Introduction (participants, instructors)
• Variable fonts
• Arduino and sensors
• Building an interface with HTML, CSS, and JS to interrelate a variable font and sensor data
• Sensor Variable Font model
• Developing a graphic interface prototype

It was a huge surprise what some of the participants achieved in such a short time! Here some results:

Bruna Sousa’s clock prototype

Marie Malarme’s variable color font sun / starts

Game intro Workshop: https://sensor-variable-font-workshop.netlify.app/