Giving up Geomanist

This is a pretty design-orientated post, so if you’re not into that, it won’t make sense.

Before we start, there are some specific definitions to the words I’m using here. Most people use these words interchangeably, but I’m going to try and use the correct terms in this post.

Typography – how text is arranged in a design.

Typeface – a design feature set for letters, including things like the shapes and whether it has serifs. If you’re using a word processor, this is the name that you see when you choose what your text looks like on the paper.

Font – a variation in the weight and size of a typeface. Using the same word processor example, this is whether your text is size 12, italic or bold.

After spending some of my professional life working as a visual designer, I find that typography has become important to me on my personal projects as well as my professional ones. It’s both a blessing and a curse to open up a page and find oneself wondering if the kerning is too much as opposed to reading the content on the page. And let’s not get started on the overuse of a certain comic-based typeface in printed media when there are far more accessible alternatives.

Anyway. I have a very particular way I like typefaces to look. For screen use, a sans-serif typeface with simpler shapes will be easiest to read on a variety resolutions and device types. Each of these typefaces needs a good subset of fonts – my works make use of both bold and thin weights as well as sections in italic. A typeface which doesn’t have these font styles isn’t going to cut it for me.

When I choose a new typeface for a personal project, I look for several key things:

• Is it readable on a variety of screens and systems? For example, Windows will render typefaces in a different way than macOS.
• Is it accessible for all users? Users with dyslexia may find it harder to read certain typefaces.
• Does the font have different weights and styles?

And finally:

• What does the lower-case letter g look like?

This final point is almost always the decider for me. Call me pedantic or snobby, but when I write the lower-case letter g, I don’t like adding a neck or a loop to the character. It feels excessive and increases cognitive load when reading.

Over the few iterations of design my site has had, the typeface and fonts have always been one of the first things I look at, trying out a handful to see how they work on a proposed layout. Google Fonts is usually a good place to start when working with prototypes, especially if the prototype is HTML. It lets you swap entire typefaces with a single line of code.

A few years back, I found that I couldn’t find any typefaces that fit any of the criteria above that worked well with the site design. The only way to fix this issue was to spend some money on a typeface which had a permissive web license. I settled on atipo’s Geomanist family.

As the name implies, Geomanist is a geometric sans-serif typeface. In simpler terms, it’s a typeface based upon simple geometric shapes like squares and circles that doesn’t have extensions on the end of strokes.

Geomanist quickly became part of the brand for my web materials, encompassing my portfolio, side projects and other unrelated things that lived on my domain. Its simple shapes and relative ease of reading on screens meant it it worked out as a drop-in replacement for areas of my site that used different typefaces.

Since then, the web has changed and web typography has matured significantly. All major browser vendors support it and digital foundries offer up vast catalogues of typefaces. One thing that I’ve started to notice in the last few years is that Geomanist has a condensed appearance when compared to other fonts – that is to say, it feels like the letters are a bit too narrow when set in paragraphs of text. It’s not a huge problem, but it has started to irk me somewhat now we’re entering an era with high resolution screens on even the smallest devices we own.

But changing one’s brand is hard, especially when it’s something as central as a typeface. Many companies have recently tried updating their core brand typefaces, with mixed results. The only reason to change Geomanist would be if the replacement offered better readability.

I’ve spent the last few years looking at alternatives to Geomanist and until recently had never found anything better.

If you’re looking at those two examples and thinking “but there’s no real difference” then it means this was a success. The fonts are so similar that the brand is kept, but the text on a page is slightly easier to read. The lower one in the image is Nunito Sans – a typeface I’d tried in the past but for some reason didn’t use. It has similar letter structure and shape while being less narrow. I find it is easier to read in larger paragraphs such as on this journal. I feel the sizing of the characters in Nunito Sans is a lot more consistent and the permissive licensing lets me use it throughout the site.

All these words to say “I’m changing Geomanist to something that looks similar but is more readable.” The change is rolling out to all pages of my site now so you might already be reading this in the newer typeface!