Why Typeface Choice Matters (Even When It Doesn’t)
Understanding the art of the designer through the lens of typeface choices.
Take a look at these two different expressions of the same idea, the idea of ‘a’:
Do you spot the difference? I’m guessing you do, they are quite distinctly different. But let’s vary the weight and see how they react:
How about now? They are still recognizably different in structure, but the distinction is clearly minimized. Note that here they are effectively at a pt size of about 300; try to imagine them in the context in which these typefaces are normally employed: a 14 pt size on a mobile screen. How noticeably different would they be then?
You might not be convinced still, and that’s okay — I intentionally started with the example of the fairly differentiable letterform of ‘a’. Let’s take a look at some more interesting examples to really prove the point:
Does the difference still stand out to you? Or better yet:
How about now? Inter or SF Pro, can you tell the difference? I can’t.
And users definitely can’t.
So, why does it matter? What’s the difference? Just throw in Inter, SF Pro, Roboto — hell, even Helvetica while we’re at it, who cares? Users certainly don’t — neo-grotesques one way or another, right? Modernist, sleek, efficient — why burden ourselves with the concern for their unnecessary subtle details?
The pursuit of this answer is worth our time and effort because in answering this we go a lot deeper than just type — we go into Design and what it means fundamentally to the user, to the designer, and to the world. There is a lot of incomplete reasoning out there as to why typeface choices matter and how it shapes the design: some argue that choosing type is about orchestrating the manner in which users subconsciously make personal and cultural associations while experiencing your design, or about the cultural connotations of a typeface in relationship with the ideas being expressed through the text. Some hold that an important consideration is the special characters that are required in the text at hand (such as mathematical notations like ¬, π, ∆ or alphabets like æ, ì, ß — a luxury which some typefaces might not offer). The general idea in all of these points is that the choice of type should suit the users’ context and their mental models of expectations.
While this is true at a higher level, all of this logic falls flat when it comes to choosing between two very similar typefaces like Inter and SF Pro. Every consideration mentioned above would treat both of these typefaces as virtually the same thing — because of their conformation to the same type group classification, facilitation of a similar experience to users, an equally wide range of characters available in each, and similar ideological backgrounds. Widely popular and accepted typographic manuals like Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style list a myriad of considerations⁵ that can inform your type decisions—from the medium the typeface was originally designed for, to the availability of the boldface, to the historical context of the type — and yet even here it is hard to find even a single point that would distinguish or guide a choice between Inter and SF Pro (or any other pair of remarkably similar faces).
So, why does a choice between Inter and SF Pro matter if it has no bearing on the user experience? Well, the way it seems to me is — and you might have guessed what I’m about to suggest — it isn’t for the user. It’s for you, the designer. The distinction lies in your own relationships with the two.
This might seem counter-intuitive considering the user-centered philosophy of design that we have globally agreed on for the past 30 odd years, but it is in fact just a clarification and extension of the same idea. Every design has 3 distinct, equally important characters or roles being brought together through the work: the designer, the user, and the world around the two. To understand what that means, we need to start here: who are you, and what are you doing? You are a designer of human experiences. Through users’ relationships with things you design, you re-model and extend human behaviour, in an attempt to achieve a healthier, more complete existence. You might’ve been told over and over that what you’re doing is “solving problems” for “real users” but it goes a lot deeper than that, you are actually creating an idealization of the world based on how you think it should be (in one domain, at least), and are then creating tools to bridge the gap between the world today and this ideal version of the world that you envision — using users as the vehicle of this growth.
Design always embeds a story, and the better the design the more truthful the story. The story is about the world around us, and in order to successfully capture and enable the world you idealize through your design, you need to work with these 3 characters simultaneously — the designer, the user, and the world — and integrate their truth in addition to your own truth into the story you’re telling. This is the crux of the role of the designer, and this is the most important motivation that echoes in any design choice made throughout the design process. Here we talk about choosing typefaces but really type is just a metaphor for all of design — any general ideas discussed here regarding typeface decisions can be abstracted to any kind of design decisions.
We often hear about design being a mixture of art and science but we rarely ever fully understand and appreciate what it means beyond just a merger of creative and technical ability. It is at the intersection of Art and Science that your choice of typeface lives. Art is an expression of an abstract relationship between the individual artist and the truth of reality — the world, if you will — made possible through a tangible, concrete medium; while Science is the practice of pursuing and representing universal explanatory truths about reality as they appear objectively. By means of the 3 characters outlined above, both of these aspects come to life through the act of design:
The science of design lives in your users. The usability, usefulness, desirability of a product are all aspects of the science of design — they are quantifiable and verifiable. They involve the pursuit of a generalizable reality of groups of human beings. To capture your users’ truth means to embed and extend users’ habits and behaviours and motivations through your work. In the absence of this element, the design will never be complete because it is then not capturing the users’ character, but merely capturing your perception of reality — it is, for all intents and purposes, art.
Empathy is what distinguishes the designer from the artist.
Design choices you make — including the typeface you choose — need to be enabled for resonance with the users’ reality. All the considerations listed above will come into play in this part — the context of the product, the cultural background of the user, the readability and completeness of the typeface, and so on. These are important points to help you narrow down and shortlist a broader type classification based on letterform structure or ideological background, but they will not help you select a specific face within the category — i.e. it’ll help you narrow down to neo-grotesques, say, but won’t be able to guide you to choose between Inter and SF Pro.
The art of design lives in you. The story you are telling through your work is nothing but your expression of reality and what is lacking in it, and further, your expression of how you believe reality could and should be. Where you are enabling a dialogue between your users and the idealized world, you are also enabling a dialogue between yourself and the truth you bear—and the former is effectively just a medium to express the latter.
Design choices you make — including the typeface you choose — need to be enabled for resonance with your reality. Every typeface in itself is a piece of art — it represents a worldview, an artist’s individual expression of the world, a manifestation of the type designer’s individual truths — and you, as an artist, need to use this typeface as a tool, in turn, to express and create your own art in tandem with your version of the world — just like the painter uses colours or the director uses actors. JK Rowling could’ve very easily written Harry Potter’s Voldemort as a character named Victor or Vladik or John, even, and her readers wouldn’t have flinched, but to claim that character names don’t make a difference is incorrect because the story she told was not just for her readers but also for herself and how reality seemed to her, and her tool of expressing it was Voldemort, not John. She had a relationship with the idea of Voldemort, and she projected it through her work. By the same token, you, as an artist, need to leverage your own subjective relationships with specific ideas of the abstract concept of the alphabet — typefaces — and choose one that resonates with the overall expression you are working towards. Coca Cola’s red colour could very easily have been #F50009 instead of #F40009, with absolutely no impact on even the heaviest coke drinker’s experience, but it is not, because the story starts from the designers, not the users, and the story that Coca Cola is telling is painted in #F40009.
Every visual creative work is a manifestation of the character of the designer. It is a reflection of his knowledge, his ability, and his mentality. (Josef Müller-Brockmann, 1982)⁶
It’s not just about the typeface, it’s also about what the typeface represents. Every artform enables the artist to express themselves within the worldly constraints of a medium or a tool — the painter is constrained by the 16 million available colours, for instance, the sculptor by the durability and availability of materials, and the writer by the breadth of the English language. These constraints are also what define the artforms. As a designer, you are more than an artist and so your constraint isn’t just the availability of the elements— shapes, words, grid systems, typefaces (which are themselves forms of art) — but also existing human behaviour and the existing state of the world. The world in and of itself is the biggest constraint — and definer — of the designer’s art. Design is a recursively defined artform because as it turns out the best way to explain the medium of expression in design is as Art itself, and the constraint as Science. Design is art constrained by science, and by the same token, design is also science liberated by art.
The choice of typeface sits inside this entire mishmash of self-referential concepts and it really is the point where the rubber hits the road — it captures the designer’s art as well as the users’ science, as well as the world’s collective understanding that encompasses and enables resonance between the two. These 3 aspects are always at odds with each other and often demand a great deal of compromise to enable peaceful coexistence for the design to exist successfully, but this state of coexistence is absolutely uncompromisable. For the designer to completely sacrifice on the typeface choice for the sake of the users’ experience is to allow the design to go off the rails without the check of direction that imbibed it with virtue. This is best understood through an analogy of a car with a navigator on a road headed towards a given destination (where design isn’t represented by any one of these three things but rather by all of them and their relationship with each other): when the user’s truth is allowed to override the designer’s, we have a car with no navigator, guided by its own chaotic mechanical naivete; when the designer’s truth is allowed to override the user’s, we have a navigator with an intended destination but no vehicle to get there; and when either of these two is allowed to override the world’s truth, the entire road is forsaken: we have intent and we have direction and we have a vehicle, but we do not have possibility.
To solidify these concepts with an example, let’s look at Twitter. Twitter’s DNA is built with the belief that honest, human, comprehensible public conversation is the road to a truer and healthier and more stable society. Twitter is a platform that clearly resonates with its users, and it continuously keeps evolving to better suit its users’ behaviour and needs, but the tension between the user’s truth and the designer’s truth still exists to this day: for example, despite years of pleas from users, Twitter still won’t provide an “edit tweet” feature or an “unsend message” option (in the DMs). This is because the idealization of the world that Twitter holds — consciously or unconsciously — is a world in which conversation is authentic and human, and by that token, one’s mistakes should be accommodated, and one’s mistakes should be forgiven by oneself. You grow from the things you say and the mistakes you make, and Twitter endorses that growth of character by facilitating unrectifiable errors, encouraging an attitude of caution and improvement while maintaining the quality of real-world, human communication. This is a design choice that Twitter has not given up on, and if it does, it will lose the navigator and be led astray by the naivete of the unruly mob — only to reach a chaotic state of the world that the designers never intended to reach.
For Twitter to be in resonance with the reality of the world means for it to conform to what we have already established as the concept of an “app”, “social media”, a “typeface” and so on. If Twitter were to use a series of images or colour gradients to communicate language in place of a typeface, the artistic expression of the designer will have forgotten the road of possibility and all that’ll be left will be wishful thinking and aspiration for an unachievable goal.
Designers spoke to nature and listened to nature’s response. Good design emerged as an apt response to truth. Design mimicked and emulated natural truth by being true to nature. (Robert Grudin, 2010)⁷
So, Inter, SF pro, Arial, Univers, Helvetica — the user doesn’t and shouldn’t care, and it’s best when they don’t. But you need to care because these are your tools to tell your story, to articulate your vision, to express your reality. You are a part of the design. The typeface is a part of your truth — it is a medium for expressing it. Inter and SF Pro do come from similar cultural backgrounds and are built with a very similar structure, and sure the end products would be nearly identical and make absolutely no difference to a user, but look beyond the user, look beyond the type designer, look beyond culture, look beyond the constraints, and look to yourself. Your intent is what keeps the chaos of the world at bay. Never sacrifice your art for its science.
Sources & References:
- Rasmus Andersson, The Inter Typeface Family.
- Apple Inc., SF Pro.
- Joey Banks, iOS & iPadOS 14 UI Kit for Figma.
- Mark Moreo, iPhone X — Gummy Mockups.
- Robert Bringhurst, “Choosing & Combining Type”, The Elements of Typographic Style.
- Josef Müller-Brockmann, Grid Systems in Graphic Design.
- Robert Grudin, Design and Truth.
