Surveyor
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How to use
Surveyor
Surveyor celebrates what maps do best, providing designers with an expressive typographic vocabulary to help articulate many different kinds of information. The family includes three separate designs for different sizes, and a wealth of decorative options.
In each of its three optical sizes, the Surveyor family contains five weights from Light to Black, each provided in roman, italic, both roman and italic small caps, and swashes. Surveyor 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 Surveyor, the style that’s two steps heavier has sufficient visual contrast to serve as a boldface:
Surveyor ScreenSmart is designed for on-screen text. To emphasize any of its styles, use the weight that’s two steps heavier:
Use Surveyor’s italics to distinguish text without changing its weight:
For more contrast, use the small caps:
Use the capital and small cap swashes in Surveyor’s italics to incrementally decorate the typography by degrees:
Surveyor includes fonts specifically drawn for different sizes, from small text up through the very largest headlines.
2.1Using Optical Sizes
To ensure that its delicate features are always crisp and legible, Surveyor is offered in three different optical sizes, each designed for use at a different scale. The delicate details in Surveyor Fine are intended for the very largest of sizes, Surveyor Display is designed for headlines and subheads, and Surveyor Text for text sizes and below. Each of these optical sizes is available individually, or together in the Surveyor Complete package.
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.
Headlines
Text
Text
ScreenSmart® (SSm) fonts, designed for web and mobile applications, are engineered to work on screen at text sizes.
Text
For decorative applications, Surveyor’s cousin Obsidian is a family of shaded typefaces for very large sizes.
The Obsidian family (available separately) is a collection of intricately shaded typefaces based on Surveyor, and provided in chromatic layers for creating two-color typography.
Surveyor has four types of numbers: lining figures for text, tabular figures for setting numbers in columns, two kinds of fractions, and superscripts and subscripts.
Surveyor 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 Surveyor’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
Surveyor 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
Surveyor 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.
7.3Smart Swashes
Individual swash caps and small caps in Surveyor Italic are automatically eliminated whenever they become entangled, or when they create gaps in the text. When swashes are used with enough letterspacing to avoid collisions, this feature can be suppressed by activating Stylistic Set 08.
7.4Capital Punctuation
Some design applications include an all caps option that not only capitalizes lowercase letters, but invokes the feature in Surveyor 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 Surveyor’s lining figures.
Each Surveyor 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
Surveyor features H&Co’s Expanded Latin character set.
Surveyor 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.
