Ringside
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How to use
Ringside
Designed as a text-size complement to our Knockout family, Ringside is a powerhouse sans serif in six widths, each in eight weights, with both romans and italics.
Each of the six widths in the Ringside family contains eight weights from Thin to Black, each provided in both roman and italic. Ringside 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 Ringside, the style that’s three steps heavier has sufficient visual contrast to serve as a boldface:
Ringside ScreenSmart is designed for on-screen text. To emphasize any of its styles, use the weight that’s two steps heavier:
Use Ringside’s italics to distinguish text without changing its weight:
Designed with text in mind, Ringside has the optical adjustments, character set, and family tree necessary for setting complex content at small sizes. The typefaces are equally at home in headline sizes, especially with the addition of tight tracking (negative value letter-spacing, in css.)
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, Ringside ScreenSmart is an adaptation specifically designed for use on screen at text sizes, and engineered to deliver superior rendering in web browsers.
2.1Fitting to Width
Ringside’s subtle gradation of widths offers a typographic solution to the problem of text that runs long or short. In many contexts, the substitution of a slightly narrower or wider font can pass unnoticed by even the most attentive reader.
Text/Headlines
Text/Headlines
Text/Headlines
Text/Headlines
Text/Headlines
Text/Headlines
ScreenSmart® (SSm) fonts, designed for web and mobile applications, are engineered to work on screen at text sizes.
Text
Text
Text
Text
Text
Text
Text
Ringside’s lighter styles 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 Ringside, try moving one weight lighter every time you increase the size of the type by one third, keeping in mind that smaller type always benefits from a little extra letterspacing, and a bump to its point size.
Ringside has four types of numbers: lining figures for text, tabular figures for setting numbers in columns, fractions and fraction parts, and superscripts and subscripts.
Ringside 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 Ringside’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.
5.1Stylistic Sets
5.2Additional Characters
Ringside automatically adjusts spacing to improve typography.
6.1Kerning
Ringside 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.
6.2Capital Punctuation
Some design applications include an all caps option that not only capitalizes lowercase letters, but invokes the feature in Ringside 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 forms of symbols designed to accompany Ringside’s lining figures.
Ringside features H&Co’s Expanded Latin character set.
Ringside 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.
