On Choosing a Typeface for a Year

We spent more time choosing typefaces for this site than on almost any other single decision. This sounds disproportionate, and in one sense it is — the typefaces do not change the content, the thinking, the editorial position. In another sense it is exactly proportionate: the typefaces are the first thing you see. They are the voice before the words.

The first version used a more common serif for headlines — something from the editorial tradition, instantly legible, entirely appropriate. We published with it for about three weeks. The site looked correct. It looked like a literary publication. And that was exactly the problem. It looked like many other literary publications, and we had not built Augustra to look like anything else.

What Type Actually Does

A typeface carries cultural memory. It has been used before, in specific contexts, for specific purposes, and those uses accumulate around the letterforms. When you choose a typeface, you are choosing everything it has been — every publication that has used it, every era of design it belongs to, every set of associations it carries. This is useful when you want to borrow that authority. It becomes a liability when you want to say something different.

DM Serif Display, which we eventually settled on for headlines, is a particular kind of contemporary serif — somewhere between the warmth of classic book type and the drama of display faces used in fashion. It is not immediately literary in the way that older serifs are. It is alert, slightly angular, with a formality that is not stuffy. Paired with Outfit — a contemporary sans that is clean without being cold — it creates a tension we wanted: serious but not academic, editorial but not archival.

The right typeface is not the most beautiful typeface. It is the typeface that disappears into the reading.

The Label Typeface

The third typeface — Space Mono — is the one that surprised us most. We introduced it for dates, labels, and navigation items because we wanted something that would mark the administrative layer of the site as distinct from the editorial layer. What we found is that the monospaced grid of Space Mono, used at small sizes and in all caps, functions as a kind of visual breath: it interrupts the serif-and-sans rhythm without competing with it.

The three typefaces together tell a small story about how this site understands itself: the serif for things that want to last, the sans for the contemporary surface, the monospace for the architecture underneath.

We will use these typefaces for at least a year without changing them. The decision has been made. Now we have to live inside it and see what we learn.