Variety

Installation

• Download the aescripts ZXP Installer
• Open or drag the Variety.zxp file in the ZXP installer
• Restart After Effects
• Navigate to Window > Extensions > Variety

General

Variety lets you animate variable fonts. It reads the paths from the font file and turns them into shape layer paths. It will set an initial keyframe and lets you add additional keyframes based on the configuration of the font’s axes. The interpolation between the keyframes is handled by After Effects.

Note that regular fonts are not supported because they don’t contain any axes.

Resources

There’s a whole bunch of variable fonts resources out there. Here’s a selection to get you going.

General

• Adobe’s primer on variable fonts
• Google’s primer on variable fonts

Playgrounds

• V-Fonts
• Axis Praxis
• Font Playground

Collections

• Future Fonts
• Google Fonts
• Adobe Fonts

Fonts

• Wisetype Zaft
• 29LT Okaso
• Bitcount

Adding Fonts

Simply drag and drop your variable fonts onto the panel and they’ll be added to the list. See the supported filetypes. The added variable fonts are only available in the list during the session. In a new session Variety will try to automatically load the font from the layer generated by Variety.

Adobe Fonts

The variable fonts installed through Adobe Fonts are tucked away on the file system. Find them in the following directory. You might have to show hidden files to access these folders.

Windows

C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CoreSync\plugins\livetype\r

Mac OS

~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync/plugins/livetype/.r

Default Fonts

Variety comes with a selection of open source fonts that are licensed under the SIL Open Font License. You are free to distribute and use these fonts in commercial projects. Please read the license for further details.

• Anybody
  Copyright 2020 The Anybody Project Authors

• Graduate
  Copyright 2012-2019 Eduardo Tunni

• Tiny
  Copyright 2019 Jack Fahnestock

• Trispace
  Copyright 2020 The Trispace Project Authors

• Workbench
  Copyright 2021 The Sixtyfour Project Authors

Pseudo-Effect

A pseudo-effect will be added to the generated layer to control alignment, spacing and font-size.

Auto Refresh

The panel is updated automatically whenever you select a Variety layer—which is a shape layer with a Variety effect applied to it. It reads the layer comment to determine the word(s) and font that was used.

Supported Filetypes

Both .ttf and .otf are supported.

Known Issues

• You can’t edit multiple Variety layers at once
• Variety will overwrite the layer comment to store its data
• Some fonts (mainly script fonts) give unexpected results, because they require the font’s interpolation
• Changing the order of the shape groups leads to unexpected results
• The dropdown menus don’t work in AE 23.1 and 23.2. Please update to AE 23.3+

License Agreement

Please read the End User License Agreement (EULA) before you download Variety.

By purchasing and using a copy of Variety you agree without reservation to be bound by the terms of the EULA. If you do not agree with the terms of the EULA, please do not download or use a copy of Variety.

Support

Contact support if anything is unclear or you’re running into issues.

Changelog

1.0.0 – 2023-03-14

• Initial Release