Type
Mar 12, 2026
7 min read
Typography carries more than words
Before anyone reads a sentence on your site, the type has already told them who you are. Choose what it says.
There's a moment before reading — half a second, maybe less — when a visitor's eye takes in the page as pure shape. Column, contrast, weight, space. In that half second the typography has already introduced you, and everything the words say next gets checked against that first impression.
Set the register, then the text
A condensed grotesque set huge and tight says: confident, direct, a little loud. A book serif on a long measure says: patient, considered, here for readers. Neither is better. But shipping one while your copy speaks in the other voice is how sites end up feeling faintly wrong in ways nobody can name.
Scale is honesty
Timid type scales — 18, 20, 24, 28 — read as indecision. If the heading matters, let it be four times the body, not 1.4 times. The jump is information: it tells the reader exactly what's structure and what's prose. Every size in between is a hedge.
My rule for this site was simple: two faces, real jumps, uppercase means display. The type was designed before a single sentence was written — because the type is read first.