Day 75: font palettes

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It’s time to get me up to speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.


Apparently, multicolored typefaces on the web are a thing. You can use and modify them in CSS.

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Rocher';
  src: url('/fonts/RocherColorGX.woff2');
}

h1 {
  font-family: "Rocher";
}

woah!

Pretty cool, right? What’s even cooler is that color fonts come with a default color palette and optionally with a set of alternative palettes that you can access via CSS.

11 palette each with 4 colors
The font “Rocher” comes with 11 palettes

In order to use a different palette, you have to reference and associate it with a font using the @font-palette-value rule. Within the rule, you assign a palette using the base-palette property. The value is an index, starting at 0 (default palette). Rocher comes with 11 palettes, which means that you can assign values between 0 and 10.

@font-palette-values --pink {
  font-family: 'Rocher';
  base-palette: 1;
}

@font-palette-values --green {
  font-family: 'Rocher';
  base-palette: 2;
}

@font-palette-values --gray {
  font-family: 'Rocher';
  base-palette: 9;
}

To use a palette, you use the font-palette property and reference the name you’ve defined in the @font-palette-values rule (You pick the name, it's not predefined).

h1 {
  font-palette: --pink;
}

woah!

h1 {
  font-palette: --green;
}

woah!

h1 {
  font-palette: --gray;
}

woah!

See on CodePen

Further reading

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Overview: 100 Days Of More Or Less Modern CSS