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Design Systems

The Pair That Did Not Match

·7 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

Also available as a typeset book

Guides to pairing typefaces agree that the two faces must contrast, and we think that is sound craft, inherited from people who set a great deal of type. The reason usually given for it does not hold up. And the pair we once offered as a model fails the one check a ruler can make. Set the two faces at the same size and one lowercase stands about a seventh taller than the other.1

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • Why a second face at all
  • What the practitioners wrote
  • A perceptual claim with nothing under it
  • The one thing a tool can settle
  • Families drawn to fit
  • Measure the x-heights, judge the contrast

About the book

Notes

  1. @capsizecss/metrics 4.3.0, xHeight, capHeight and unitsPerEm for interTight, sourceSerif4, alegreya and alegreyaSans, regular; Google Fonts n.d., description; Google Fonts n.d., description; Adobe Typekit Blog 2014, post: a transitional design after Fournier. Metrics extracted from the Google Fonts files: Inter Tight 1118 of 2048 units, Source Serif 4 475 of 1000, giving 0.546 em and 0.475 em and a ratio of 1.149. Source Serif 4 ships optical sizes whose lowercase heights differ, and these figures are the default instance; anyone setting a book should read the heights from the files their own engine loads. Evidence A: strong or direct evidence.

Sources

  • Seek OSS (n.d.). @capsizecss/metrics 4.3.0, entireMetricsCollection: alegreya, alegreyaSans, interTight and sourceSerif4 regular (metrics extracted from Google Fonts). cdn.jsdelivr.net
  • Google Fonts. Inter Tight description (google/fonts repository) raw.githubusercontent.com
  • Google Fonts. Source Serif 4 description (google/fonts repository) raw.githubusercontent.com
  • Adobe Typekit Blog (20 May 2014). Introducing Source Serif blog.typekit.com

Further reading