A year of one typeface

In January of last year I decided that everything I made — sites, decks, the notes app I keep threatening to finish — would be set in one family. No pairing, no display face, no exceptions. I wanted to find out how much of what I think of as typography is actually just font shopping.

The honest answer is: most of it. I had been solving hierarchy problems by introducing a new voice, which works, in the way that turning the volume up works.

What you find when you cannot change the font

You find size. Not the four sizes I had been using, which were all within a few points of each other and therefore not a hierarchy at all, but a real ratio — body, then something clearly bigger, then something enormous. When the only lever is scale, you stop being timid with it.

You find weight, but less than you expect. Two weights carried the whole year. A third was always a symptom of a layout problem I had not solved.

And you find space, which is where nearly all of it went. Almost every hierarchy problem I had been treating as a type problem was a spacing problem wearing a disguise. Two headings that felt equally important usually just had identical margins above them.

The rule that survived

More space above a heading than below it. It sounds like nothing. It is the difference between a page that reads as sections and a page that reads as a wall.

What I went back to

I did not stay monogamous. This site pairs a serif with a sans, because there is one thing a second family does that scale and weight cannot: it changes the tone of a line rather than its importance. The serif here is not bigger than the sans. It is warmer. That is a distinction worth a second font file, and I would not have been able to name it a year ago.

Everything else — the four sizes, the six weights, the display face I used once — I have not missed.