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Typography serves language, not the convenience of a system.

The strongest type systems are specific, opinionated, and crafted with care for the context they serve.
For many designers, typography is a first love. In the pages of design books and type manuals, the environment feels steady. Columns, baselines, and margins hold firm. Letterforms lock into place, and paragraphs stay within their bounds.
The web plays by different rules. Sentences wrap unpredictably, and paragraphs break in unexpected places. To restore order, designers often reach for systemized solutions like 4px grids or component libraries. Design tools reinforce this reflex, rewarding what is easy to measure with neat numbers.
But typography has always lived beyond measurement. It rests on the eye: human perception, balance, and the subtle adjustments that quick calculations can't account for. Reduced to digital conveniences, these nuances are often lost, and with them the legibility typography is meant to sustain.
That gap between what typography needs and what these abstracted systems offer is where our work began. This is the story of how we designed Atlas, a type system for Adaline.
21 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 1 Oct
I would love to be able to think about typography at this level.
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Once you get it there's no way back. The same way every one of us has a different voice, as a different hand writings that tell much about the writer itself. A font can tell stories by its shapes and forms — It's actually not telling anything, it is simply our subconscious making the mnemonic and cultural connection to give it a meaning.
A font can express the dialects and accents like our voice does. It reflects personality and traits. Custom Fonts, when the identity, values, and mission of the tool is clear, can do it really well.
i.e. for this tool, I'd not have expected a 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑓. More a 𝚖𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚜𝚙𝚊𝚌𝚎, but due to the instilled idea that AI will at some stage think, they opted for a more humanistic-sans-serif font. And from there the comparison with the Brand font Akkurat and Inter (both sans-serif).
I found the analysis and process to reach the final design pretty interesting
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Thanks for posting, looks great. For others looking for more context:
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