Mercury Text
Get all four grades of Mercury Text for less than the cost of two!
How to use
Mercury Text
A collection of bright and sparkling text faces originally designed for the hardscrabble world of newspaper printing, Mercury Text is designed with features that help counter the effects of different kinds of media including paper, packaging, signage, and screens.
Each of the four grades in the Mercury Text family contains the three weights Regular, Semibold, and Bold, each in roman, italic, and roman small caps.
Mercury Text places as much distance as possible between its Regular and Bold weights, to ensure that they’re unambiguously distinguishable at small sizes:
Mercury ScreenSmart is designed for on-screen text. To emphasize any of its styles, use the weight that’s two steps heavier:
Use Mercury Text’s italics to distinguish text without changing its weight:
For more contrast, use the small caps:
Mercury Text is designed for comfortable reading at text sizes. Its large, generously fitted lowercase, accentuated by compact capitals and tall ascenders, make the typeface bright and alert at small sizes. All of Mercury’s styles are designed with small size reproduction and legibility in mind, from its simplified italic to its especially dark boldface.
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.
For digital applications, Mercury ScreenSmart is an adaptation specifically designed for use on screen at text sizes, and engineered to deliver superior rendering in web browsers.
Text
Text
ScreenSmart® (SSm) fonts, designed for web and mobile applications, are engineered to work on screen at text sizes.
Text
2.4Using Optical Sizes
The robust construction of Mercury Text recommends it for reproduction at small sizes. At larger sizes, the Mercury Display family (available separately) offers the sharp details and tight fit more typical of headline typography.
Mercury Text has four types of numbers: lining figures for text, tabular figures for setting numbers in columns, fractions and fraction parts, and superscripts and subscripts.
Mercury Text 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.
Because the appearance of a typeface is affected by its medium, Mercury Text is designed in four different grades to give designers fine control over the ‘color’ of the type.
To enable printing presses to operate at breakneck speeds, newsprint is formulated to help ink dry quickly through absorption, instead of slowly through oxidation. Porous paper encourages ink to spread, darkening the appearance of the type, so typefaces must be designed to anticipate this expansion on press. Mercury Text is designed in four different versions called grades, which preempt different degrees of gain, from the crisp Grade 1 to the robust Grade 4.
Not merely for newsprint, graded type can compensate for all kinds of environmental conditions, helping white type knock out of solid colors on packaging, and letters on highway signs resist the effects of retroreflective halation. Because all four grades of Mercury Text share the same character widths, grade selection can be made independently of a design, making it easy to adjust typographic color without changing the layout. The Mercury Text Complete package includes all four grades, for designers whose work regularly spans different sizes and different media.
Magazines
Newsprint
Books
Catalogs
Packaging
Letterpress
ScreenSmart® (SSm) fonts, designed for web and mobile applications, are engineered to work on screen at text sizes.
Web
Mobile
Video/Film
Applied Letters
Dimensional
Backlit
Retro-reflective
6.1Stylistic Sets
6.2Additional Characters
Mercury Text automatically adjusts spacing and character choices to improve typography.
7.1Ligatures
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.
7.2Kerning
Mercury Text 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.
Each grade of Mercury Text 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
Mercury Text features H&Co’s Expanded Latin character set.
Mercury Text 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.
