Type as infrastructure

Teams often treat fonts as a brand flourish. In product work they behave more like infrastructure: load paths, fallbacks, metric stability, and the quiet contract that every screen will feel related.

We start with three questions. What must remain legible at twelve pixels? What carries emotion at display size? What survives a poor network?

Answers tend to converge on a restrained stack — one workhorse sans for UI, one serif for long reading, and a monospace for technical asides. Everything else is optional.

The goal is not a museum of typefaces. It is a system a junior designer can extend without inventing a new personality every sprint.