Choosing a typeface is a promise
A typeface is the voice your product speaks in before anyone reads a word. Notes on how we audition type, and why we almost always end up with fewer fonts than we started with.
Sandra Baker
Design Director
Before a visitor reads a single sentence of your carefully written copy, the typeface has already spoken. It said serious, or friendly, or trying too hard, in the first two hundred milliseconds — and everything you write afterwards is heard in that voice. Choosing one is not a styling decision. It is a promise about who you are, renewed on every page.
Audition with real words
The classic mistake is choosing type from a specimen page. Specimens are propaganda: every face looks magnificent set as “Hamburgevons” at 120 pixels. We audition typefaces the way you audition an actor — with the actual script. The dullest screens we have: a settings page, a data table, an error state, a paragraph of legal text. A face that stays composed in the boring rooms has earned the beautiful ones.
Three checks we always run:
- The number test. Tabular figures in a column — do totals align, do zeros and Os confuse, does a date look like a date?
- The small test. Thirteen pixels, muted color, a long line. Most display darlings collapse here.
- The neighbor test. Set it next to the interface font it must live with. Two voices are a conversation; three is a committee.
Fewer fonts, more optical sizes
Nearly every project we take on arrives with too many typefaces and leaves with fewer. The current count on this very site is one voice doing three jobs: a quiet grotesk for the words that matter and the interface around them, and its mono cousin for dates and labels. That is not minimal for minimalism's sake — every family you add is a voice the reader must reconcile, and reconciliation is friction.
When a page feels noisy and you cannot say why, count the voices before you count the elements.
Optical sizes are the quiet revolution here. A face drawn differently at caption size than at display size lets one family whisper and declaim without changing its character. Ten years ago that was a luxury reserved for print. Today it is a checkbox in the font request.
Commit in writing
The last step is the one most teams skip: write the promise down. Ours fits on an index card — which family speaks, which one serves, the exact sizes each is allowed, and the two weights we actually bought. When a new screen wants an exception, the card wins the argument. Typefaces drift one “just this once” at a time, and drift is how a voice becomes a noise.
Choose slowly, then keep the promise. Your product speaks in that voice every day, to everyone, whether or not you are in the room.
Thanks for reading — slowly, we hope.
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