What are Color Fonts

This page is part of The Ultimate Font Guide, an introductory font manual that explains the basics of fonts and how to install fonts, use them in different applications and more.

An Explanatory Guide To Color Fonts

Color fonts are an important step in the evolution of graphic design. They bring fun and creative changes to your usual font files. You can expect features such as multiple colors, shades and textures. They also include vector shapes and bitmap images.

Thanks to their ability to contain all types of characters (even emojis), color fonts can change any type of text, bringing depth and richness to the design.

Chromatic Fonts

Color fonts also go by another name – chromatic fonts. Although this might sound more technical, the name is actually bit more accurate since they might include variety of colored characters.

So, what should you expect when you open a color font? Nothing new! A color font is just like a regular one, only it can use additional data to change the shape of characters into more elaborate designs.

Difference between Standard Vector fonts and Color/SVG Fonts

You can expect to find your color font saved as SVG data inside OpenType font files. The SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format holds all the extras that made you purchase the font. This is where you can also find bitmap fonts, if they are part of the main font.

Below you will find an example with some regular vector fonts. These are the ones you by default use when you are typing text in Word, your emails, etc.

And now some examples of these stunning Color Fonts

Note that all these colors fonts are examples from our color fonts library.

Color fonts have been around for a long time with companies such as Apple, Mozilla and Google designing their own version. Needless to say, because of their differences none of these color font formats have become a leader in the market. OpenType-SVG files are in a great position to change that since three main systems support the fonts: Windows 10, macOS Mojave and iOS12.

There are a couple of differences you will notice straight away when using color fonts.

1. The file size is much bigger than regular font files, some going up to tens of megabytes.
2. This difference applies only to color bitmap fonts. Just like any other pixel-based image, these fonts can be scaled properly up to a certain size. If you push beyond that resolution, the font will look pixelated.

Although OpenType-SVG are the industry standard, they currently don’t work with Silhouette Designer and Circut Design Space. You can use them on popular design software such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Sketch.

Did we peak your interest? You can start exploring all the possibilities color fonts offer with some of the best color fonts currently available.