Serif, for reading · released 2021

Quire Text

Drawn for long paragraphs on screens that are not very good.

Specimen

Reading is the only test

About

Quire Text began as a complaint. Most screen serifs are drawn for a display that renders them faithfully, and then meet a phone in daylight with the brightness turned down. The letterforms survive; the reading does not.

So the proportions here are unfashionably plain. A tall x-height, open apertures, and a stroke contrast low enough that a hairline never quite disappears. The italic is a true italic rather than a slant, because a slanted serif at fourteen pixels stops being a different voice and starts being a mistake.

It is not a display face and does not pretend to be. Set it at ninety characters and leave it alone.

Set with Quire Grotesk for labels and figures.

In use, 18 on 30

A typeface for continuous text has one job, and you can only tell whether it did that job by forgetting you were looking at it. Everything else is a specimen trick. Set a thousand words, read them tired, and see what is left.

Waterfall

72Reading is the only test
48Reading is the only test
32Reading is the only test
22Reading is the only test
16Reading is the only test
13Reading is the only test

Characters

682 glyphs in the family

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789&@?!£$.,;:

Axes

TagAxisMinDefaultMax
wghtWeight200400800
opszOptical size61672
Licence Quire Text