#freight sans

[mpieracci]

New moo cards featuring Freight Sans.

[local-boob]

[alexanderkim-type2]

[alexanderkim-type2]

[alexanderkim-type2]

[regulardomainname]

Lessons Learned from Medium.com’s Typography

It’s been said that web design is 95% typography. So as a web designer, getting the typography right is over half the battle. Today with the growing popularity of web fonts and modern CSS techniques this task has become easier, but it’s always good to learn more with something so critical. Medium has changed their body copy to Freight Text Pro with the titles and sans-serif text changed to JAF Bernino Sans. And with each change their website just keeps getting better. Medium launched in 2012 using FF Meta Serif and Myriad, and then switched to FF Tisa and Freight Sans in 2013 and later that same year moved to JAF Bernino Sans and Freight Text. FF Meta Serif and Myriad were the texts of choice in 2012. FF Tisa Web Pro accommodates a wider spectrum of article types while minimizing, more than its predecessor, the conflict of its presentation with the context of the article. While 2013’s Freight Sans gave a better visual experience than 2012, the bolded title text didn’t quite match up with the body text, breaking the entire aesthetic appeal. Later in the year Medium moved to JAF Bernino Sans and Freight Text which became the perfect combination: crisp titles and inviting with JAF Bernino Sans and Freight Text is easy on the eyes when reading blocks of text from articles. This is just a prime example of the evolution of best practices for digital type design. The combination of fonts for headings and body, as well as background is immensely important: it may define how long a potential customer will stay on your website. There are many tools to identify the fonts of a site, here’s a list of some good ones. The headings in your site are very important because most visitors only read headlines on the Internet. Attention spans have shortened and if you can’t ensnare your audience with the headline alone, they’re more likely to leave than stay and read the body text – even if it’s a well-written article. According to a Smashing Magazine study from 2013, 51% of headings use sans-serif and just over 47% choose to use serif. Serif fonts have become increasingly popular in the last few years mainly due to the belief that they stand out in headlines and offer site visitors a readable structure. On the issue of popularity, the two most popular serif fonts for headlines are Georgia and Chaparral Pro while the two most popular sans-serif fonts for headlines are Arial and Freight Sans Pro. The body of your website makes up the most important part of your content—even if fewer people read that than the actual headings and headlines on webpages. Unlike the near tie between serif and sans-serif fonts in headings, the clear winner when it comes to body copy is serif. According to the same study, a whopping 61.5% of websites utilize serif fonts in their body copy but a paltry 36.5% use sans-serif fonts for their body copy. Let’s look at how this breaks down even further. The most frequently used serif fonts for body copy are Georgia and Chaparral Pro, almost mirroring the proportions for headings. On the sans-serif front, the most frequently used sans-serif fonts for body copy are Arial and Helvetica. It’s noteworthy that the study also determined the majority of websites currently don’t use any standard fonts as their main typeface. Some 39% of the body copy and 66% of the headlines in the websites looked at in the study didn’t use standard fonts. One theory for this somewhat surprising find is that services like Fontdeck and Typekit make it easier than ever for brands to set themselves apart in a unique way from their competitors. On Backgrounds Currently the dark-on-light arrangement is popular for typography. For instance, some websites are experimenting with dark-gray text on beige background. In such a scheme, the contrast is less pronounced yet still provides readers with a comfortable reading experience that facilitates easy scanning of every line. Unsurprisingly when it comes to body copy, the old favorite of black text on a white background is still the gold standard. Besides being very easy to read because of sharp contrast, the black-on-white effect also harkens back to the classic color format of newspapers which also explains its widespread popularity on the Internet. As Darrel Andrews of MlmBarracks.com says, “Loading times, typography, style, layout, design etc, are all things that are important to your site’s overall conversion rate.” Since text is a major component of every website, having the right font for your website’s heading and body is of utter importance. Getting people to interact and buy what you’re selling, whether it’s shirts, cookies, stories or adspace means everything in business. Medium.com knows this rule well and uses it pragmatically on their site every day. Read More at Lessons Learned from Medium.com’s Typography http://dlvr.it/CMFrSr www.regulardomainname.com

[regulardomainname]

Typekit adds new Fonts to their growing Library

The Typekit team just published a new blog post detailing some brand new fonts added into their collection. It seems Q4 2015 users and beyond will have access to some grand new font families, along with additional styles to previously-existing families. Many new additions come from the foundries of Delve Fonts and Phil’s Fonts. All of the updates are fully available for web use and syncing based on Typekit plugins/apps. Here’s a list of the new fonts & font styles to expect: * Discourse Middle (Fill, Outline, and Shadow) * Stenciletta (Regular + Bold) * Stenciletta Solid (Regular + Bold) * District Pro (Light, Bold, Book, Black and Thin Italic) * Freight Macro Pro * Freight Neo Pro * Freight Sans Compressed Pro * Freight Sans Condensed Pro Visit the Typekit blog post to learn more and to check out all these fonts live on the website. Read More at Typekit adds new Fonts to their growing Library http://dlvr.it/CM5fPC www.regulardomainname.com

[somefacesforbooks]

Perhaps it's fitting that we should end this exploration where it began: on that greatest of all time-wasters, Facebook.

Klavika, once Facebook's all around display typeface of choice, has recently seen its use drop as Facebook has evolved from edgy tech startup to lumbering social media giant. It had never made its way into the interface beyond the modified version in the logotype, but even in the site's many splash sites, it's use has all but disappeared. Audience may well have something to do with it—after all, with a billion users, comforting may be better suited to chats between family members than edgy is. Klavika's pointed edges, too, are evocative of old fashioned cell phones of the kind that hardly anyone carries anymore. Facebook's new primary medium is the smartphone and so even in the latest desktop site redesign, the Facebook logotype has been reduced to little more than what's on the homescreen of an iPhone: the minuscule "f" in a color field.

On those splash sites, Klavika's heir seems to be a lesser known typeface called Freight Sans Pro. With the launch of the Facebook Stories blog late last year, Fonts In Use guessed that the choice was made because Lucida Sans & Grande, Facebook's preferred UI type, were specifically for small sizes and lacked decent display options. With the latest redesign placing the Lucidas out to pasture in favor of Helvetica, perhaps the better reason is that it just worked and blended well between them.

As designer Joshua Darden describes it, Freight Sans "eschews mannerisms of form in favor of a studied balance of organic and geometric shapes," giving it a feel that blends well with a variety of type. By their own admission, its softened angles and rounded curves offer a " warm formality in text and an authoritative, helpful tone in display." More importantly, it looks as good in body text as it does at small sizes—something that screen type only recently began to consider as important with the advent of the 300 ppi display.

Perhaps because of being featured on one of the most heavily visited sites on the planet, this typeface can now be found in dozens of places across design. Both Medium and Svbtle, two recent curated blogging services, use it in various capacities across their sites. Freight Sans is also part of a serif-rich superfamily—and, in this case, it really is quite super: comprised on the serif side of an extra large display variant, a more traditional display variant, a text variant, and a strange-looking-at-large-sizes-but-it-sure-will-print-nicely micro-text variant, as well as a condensed sans-serif, it's one of the more complete groupings you could get today. Hard to believe that the earliest of any of these is from 2005.

Also hard to believe: the price. Don't ask what getting all of these together might be, because if you have to ask, you can't afford it (and I know I can't). Part of me is surprised to offer this as the lower cost alternative, but Proxima Nova—a modern classic that, as the text describes, "straddles the gap between typefaces like Futura and Akzidenz Grotesk" with its semi-geometric humanist curves, shares many of the same concepts and appearances as Freight Sans, but with slightly more legacy behind it and a considerably lower starting cost, with single fonts costing on average $15 less than their Freight counterparts. Unfortunately, with that comes a family that isn't quite as super; there's a rounded version, but that's about it. On the free size, Ascender's lovely Open Sans does a decent job where either of the others might work but can't, and has enough weights and styles to at least keep you from wanting for extras for a little while; Lato's wide counters and geometric curves remind me a bit more of Freight, even though it lacks a bit of the precision of its paid counterpart.