Trevor PaughSystems engineer
Trevor PaughProject Chronicles

Chronicles / Project Chronicles

A heading font that hurt to read

Design

Darkroom's headings were set in Syne at its heaviest weight, which stretches very wide. The owner called it painful. It was swapped for Space Grotesk within the hour.

Darkroom, the default scheme, paired Manrope for body text with Syne for headings. Syne is a display face whose heavy weights grow steadily wider, and at hero size, in weight 800, the home page title turned into a row of stretched letterforms. The owner sent a screenshot and one sentence.

The fix was one font. Space Grotesk keeps the same geometric, slightly technical feel at a normal width and reads cleanly at every size the site uses. The other three schemes kept their faces: IBM Plex Mono for Blueprint, Fraunces for Field Notes, Archivo for Studio.

A lesson for the next scheme: check the heading face at the largest size on the site, not just in the type specimen.