Typography as a system: choosing type that holds up

When a client asks us for “an identity”, they are almost always asking for a logo. What they end up using every day, though, is something else: headlines, buttons, emails, a slide deck at eleven at night. All of that is typography. If the type fails, the identity fails in 95% of its appearances.

That's why, at Sors, the type decision comes before the symbol. It isn't an aesthetic choice — it's a systems choice. These are the three questions we ask before licensing a single font.

1. Does it hold up at both extremes?

Identity type lives at two scales at once: the cover headline at 120 pixels and the legal note at 11. We test every candidate at both extremes on day one. Plenty of families that are magnificent in display fall apart in running text; others, impeccable in a paragraph, go mute at scale. The ones that survive both tests are surprisingly few.

2. Does it have axes, not just weights?

Variable fonts changed the arithmetic. Each nuance used to be one more file to load; now a single binary covers the whole spectrum of weight and width. For a digital identity that means continuous hierarchy — not four discrete jumps — and a loading budget that fits in one request.

In practice we pin the axes in CSS as if they were tokens: one width for display, another for interface, and no touching intermediate values without a documented reason. Flexibility without rules isn't a system — it's a breakdown waiting for a date.

:root {
  /* ejes tipográficos como tokens — no valores sueltos */
  --type-display: "wdth" 68, "opsz" 48;
  --type-ui: "wdth" 100, "opsz" 14;

  /* escala fluida: un solo par de decisiones por rol */
  --text-hero: clamp(3rem, 1rem + 7vw, 8rem);
  --text-body: clamp(1rem, 0.92rem + 0.4vw, 1.125rem);
}

h1 {
  font-variation-settings: var(--type-display);
  font-size: var(--text-hero);
  line-height: 0.95;
}

3. Can someone who isn't us apply it?

The final test doesn't happen in our studio. It happens months later, when someone on the client's team builds a landing page without asking us. If they need the manual open in another tab, the system is badly designed. That's why we deliver typography as closed decisions — roles, scale, axes — not as a catalogue of possibilities.

A type system isn't measured by how good it looks in the manual, but by how hard it is to break.

None of this is doctrine. It's what works for us today with identities that live mostly on screen. If your brand lives elsewhere — packaging, wayfinding, paper — the order of the questions changes. But the first decision stays the same: the type, before the logo.