If you think about it, all typefaces are made for text – even single words on posters count as text, after all. Yet when we talk of text typefaces today, we mean fonts you can use for whole paragraphs. Ingra is a graceful and sturdy sans serif family built for text.

Formally, the Ingra design looks like a technical take on the humanist sans genre. Like other sans serifs meant for text, this typeface features large and open counters. Its lowercase letters have a tall x-height, and most glyphs show visible contrast. Strokes are not monolinear but have both thick and thin parts. They always end in either horizontal or vertical terminals. These are attributes that help make Ingra readable.

The family’s range of weights starts with the lightest Hair styles, drawn with very fine lines for use in headlines or larger-sized illustrations. The range ramps up through several heavier stroke thicknesses, ending in an Extra Bold. Each of Ingra’s ten weights is available in three different widths – condensed, regular, and expanded – bringing the family’s total size up to 30 styles. In addition to having sophisticated letterforms, Ingra’s fonts are typographically advanced, too, including small caps and about a dozen different kinds of figures. In addition to tabular and proportional lining, oldstyle, and small-cap figures, the fonts also have superior figures, inferiors, and figures for fractions, Ingra also includes figure variants inside circles and half circles. Each font’s character set offers pictograms helpful for editorial designers to have at their fingertips.

A soft, rounded sans serif, Dita combines the freshness of display type with the discipline of a text face. It ambitiously redefines what contemporaneousness can mean in a typeface. Even though its stroke-endings are round, the lighter weights are still a good choice for use in body text, thanks to details that make Dita readable at small sizes, like the letters’ generous x-height and spacious counters. Dita can also be successfully used for small text on-screen, where reading conditions are sometimes more challenging. To prove this, we made Dita is the main UI typeface on the Lettermin website.
In terms of its construction, Dita has traits in common with many sans serif typefaces. Its characters have low-contrast strokes. The family’s details show a mature approach and a dedication to craft, too. Dita has a total of 30 fonts. This includes five different weights ranging from Light to Extra Bold. Every weight has a complementary italic. Users can access these five upright and italic pairs in three different widths: condensed, normal or wide. There is a simple explanation for the relatively small number of weights. When strokes become too light or too heavy, rounded terminals at their ends can no longer be drawn optimally. This was one of the main challenges in designing Dita.
To keep the stroke-rounding consistent through all styles, the typeface’s weight range was reigned in a bit. Designers can combine the various styles – as well as the small caps in every font – to help them build hierarchies and complex information systems. The level of contrast that the Dita family offers comes in handy when you are dealing with complex text situations, like in editorial design. Dita’s character set supports almost all European languages written with the Latin script. The fonts’ typographic sophistication is rich and even extends to its numerals. Each number has five variants: lining and oldstyle figures in both proportional and tabular spacing, plus small-cap figures.

The formal constraints defining this design system allow for intriguing possibilities. Edge Sans explores the potential that minimalism and reduction offer when combined with futuristic aesthetics. Its fonts give designers a glimpse of what grids can offer letterforms.