Ideal Sans
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How to use
Ideal Sans
Bold asymmetries and subtle calligraphic overtones give Ideal Sans a handmade quality, making the design distinctive at large sizes and richly textured at small ones.
The Ideal Sans family contains eight weights from Thin to Black, each provided in roman, italic, and both roman and italic small caps. Ideal Sans maintains visually consistent intervals between its weights, to ensure that every style has a heavier counterpart that provides the same degree of emphasis.
For every weight of Ideal Sans, the style that’s three steps heavier has sufficient visual contrast to serve as a boldface:
Ideal Sans ScreenSmart is designed for on-screen text. To emphasize any of its styles, use the weight that’s three steps heavier:
Use Ideal Sans’s italics to distinguish text without changing its weight:
For more contrast, use the small caps:
Ideal Sans is suited to use at sizes large and small. Its capitals, instead of tending toward a common width, follow the classical approach of varying more naturally, with letters like E and S built on a narrower frame than the squarer H or O. This diversity creates a useful texture when setting in all caps (or small caps), helping to make Ideal Sans especially inviting and easy to read.
The following tables offer some conservative guidelines for the smallest sizes at which the fonts can comfortably be reproduced and read, assuming typical reading conditions, and conventional contrast between type and background colors. The recommendations for sizes on screen are based on the coarser resolutions of older, entry-level monitors: at the higher resolutions available on modern phones, tablets, and laptops, type is viable at even smaller sizes.
The Ideal Sans 1 package contains the core styles, and Ideal Sans 2 the peripherally lightest and darkest weights that are best used at slightly larger sizes. For digital applications, Ideal Sans ScreenSmart is an adaptation specifically designed for use on screen at text sizes, and engineered to deliver superior rendering in web browsers.
Smallest Sizes
Text
ScreenSmart® (SSm) fonts, designed for web and mobile applications, are engineered to work on screen at text sizes.
Text
2.4Normalizing Stroke Weights
The most delicate styles in Ideal Sans, included in the Ideal Sans 2 package, can be used in concert to give the appearance of a consistent stroke weight across a range of sizes. As a rule of thumb for Ideal Sans, try moving one weight lighter every time you double the size of the type, keeping in mind that smaller type always benefits from a little extra letterspacing, and a bump to its point size.
For decorative applications, Ideal Sans’s cousin Topaz is an inline typeface designed for large headline sizes.
The Topaz typeface (available separately) is a set of inline capitals modeled on Ideal Sans, and provided in chromatic layers for creating two-color typography.
Ideal Sans has five types of numbers: old-style figures for text, lining figures to accompany capitals, tabular figures for setting numbers in columns, fractions and fraction parts, and superscripts and subscripts.
Ideal Sans has features that make it easier to use tabular figures when designing data-heavy applications such as charts, tables, menus, and reports, as well as digital experiences that show dynamic data such as prices, statistics, product numbers, timetables, account numbers, points, or scores.
Many of Ideal Sans’s special characters and alternates are grouped into Stylistic Sets, an OpenType feature available in many applications that makes it easier to apply related substitutions together.
6.1Stylistic Sets
6.2Additional Characters
Ideal Sans automatically adjusts spacing and character choices to improve typography.
7.1Ligatures
To avoid a collision, a ligature for the combination ff is provided in all italic styles.
When letterspacing the lowercase, ligatures should be disabled.
7.2Kerning
Ideal Sans is spaced and kerned to perform in most circumstances without the need for manual intervention. In applications that offer multiple options for kerning type, always use the default kerning that’s native to the typefaces (labeled auto in Illustrator, and metrics in InDesign) — never use the setting for optical kerning.
So-called ‘optical kerning’ was originally developed as an automated assist for fonts that lack kerning. But applied to a professional typeface, it overrides the visual decisions made by the font’s designers, and instead spaces characters using a mathematical model. It routinely misjudges common pairs, ignores important context, and misaligns tabular figures, creating erratic and disruptive rhythms. Because its algorithms are subject to change with each software update, ‘optical kerning’ can cause text to be reflowed without notice.
7.3Capital Punctuation
Some design applications include an all caps option that not only capitalizes lowercase letters, but invokes the feature in Ideal Sans that substitutes capital-aligned numbers and punctuation. This raises characters such as dashes and enclosures so that they center on the caps, and substitutes the taller forms of symbols designed to accompany lining figures.
Each Ideal Sans package comes in two different editions: a Basic edition containing the core character set, and a Pro edition that features the comprehensive character set designed for professional typographers.
Letters
Numbers
Punctuation
Ideal Sans features H&Co’s Expanded Latin character set.
Ideal Sans supports 503 languages including Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Cebuano, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgeois, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, Scots Gaelic, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Welsh, and Zulu.
