Mercury Display
How to use
Mercury Display
Mercury Display is a family of headline faces with a modern, energetic character. Created to complement Mercury Text, its small size cousin, the sharp corners, taut curves, and athletic gestures of Mercury Display are designed with large type in mind.
Mercury Display’s romans and italics are each provided in the three weights Regular, Semibold, and Bold.
Mercury Display’s Bold weights have the correct visual contrast to emphasize type set in roman or italic:
Use Mercury Display’s italics to distinguish type without changing its weight:
For more contrast, use the roman small caps:
Mercury Display is designed for headline sizes. The following table offers 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.
Headlines
2.2Using Optical Sizes
The sharp details, taut curves, and tight fit of Mercury Display are designed for headline typography. For setting text, use the Mercury Text family (available separately), whose robust construction is designed to withstand reproduction at the very smallest sizes.
Mercury Display uses Stylistic Sets, an OpenType feature available in many applications that makes it easier to apply related substitutions together.
3.1Stylistic Sets
Mercury Display automatically adjusts spacing and character choices to improve typography.
4.1Ligatures
Collisions with the lowercase f are resolved by ligatures that are automatically substituted for the combinations fb, ff, fh, fi, fj, fk, fl, ffb, ffh, ffi, ffj, ffk, and ffl.
When letterspacing the lowercase, ligatures should be disabled.
4.2Kerning
Mercury Display 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 and ignores important context, 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.
Mercury Display features H&Co’s Expanded Latin character set.
Mercury Display 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.
