🛠️ Typeface pairing for the newsletter

💡 Use Case

• Two faces, chosen on 8 October 2023, a week after issue 1 went out in whatever the platform offered: a humanist serif for the essay and a plain grotesque for labels, dates and the sponsored line. Both are open-licensed, so there is nothing to pay and nobody to ask.
• Text: serif at 18 px with a line height of 1.55. Labels: grotesque at 13 px, small capitals, slightly spaced.
• Line length: 60 to 66 characters. Before April it ran to about 75, and I could feel readers losing their place without knowing why.
• The numbers were tightened in the spring detour, 🔭 Reading typography for the newsletter. The faces themselves did not change.

⚖️ Pros & Cons

Pros

• A serif at that size reads like a letter and not like a product update, which is the entire intention of 📂 Slack in the System - 2025 issues.
• Two faces means every piece of text is either me talking or a label. There is no third thing to style.
• Both have proper figures, so 214 sits in a sentence without shouting.

Cons

• About a third of mail programs ignore the choice and show their own serif. I design for the fallback and treat the real thing as a bonus.
• Small capitals at 13 px are near the edge of readable on a telephone.
• Having learned what a measure is, I now notice every bad one. This is a cost.

🔄 Alternatives

• One face for everything. Perfectly respectable, and what most letters I admire do.
• A third face for pull quotes. Declined in April: it is the same itch as rebuilding the notes system, in a nicer coat.