Mostly Inter

Most of the websites I have shipped this year have been set in Inter. I want to write down why, partly because I keep being asked, and partly so I can argue myself out of the habit if it stops being the right call.

Inter, by Rasmus Andersson, is a free, open-source, variable, highly considered humanist sans. It was designed for small UI sizes on screen, which is approximately ninety per cent of the typography most of my clients ship. It has a deeper character set than most free sans faces, including a respectable cyrillic. It hints well. It loads fast. The variable file is twelve kilobytes gzipped. There is no licensing conversation. There is no foundry to chase for an extended weight. There is no “we are now a Pangram Pangram customer” line item to add to the year’s costs.

The drawback is that Inter is now extremely common. A site set in it does not stand out, typographically. For some clients this is fine. For some it is not.

Cases where I default to something other than Inter:

For editorial brands, where the weight of the typography is doing real brand work. GT Sectra for display. Tiempos for body. Both expensive. Both worth it.

For brands that want a serif body. Newsreader is the free option. Söhne Schmal (a sans, but worth mentioning) for the warmth that serifs are usually trying to give.

For typographic novelty, where the brand is partly about the typeface itself. The Pangram Pangram catalogue is reliable here.

For systems-heavy products. Söhne is the cleanest pick. Inter is fine. I would not describe Inter as wrong. I would describe Söhne as slightly more confident.

The shape of the decision is roughly: if the brand wants to look “considered, modern, slightly editorial, uncomplicated”, Inter does the job at zero cost. If the brand wants to do something specific, pay for the right typeface and stop trying to make Inter do work it cannot do.

The studios I see making the most expensive typographic mistakes are the ones who refuse to default to Inter for cost reasons. They end up paying for the wrong typeface, badly applied, and the result is worse than the free option set with care.

In short: mostly Inter, sometimes not, never reluctantly.