Basefox · Type study · 26 Aug 2026
Four type systems, same screens
Your read was right and it is structural: two of the three current faces are grotesques. Space Grotesk descends from Space Mono, and Barlow is built on California highway signage. Spline Sans Mono is the humanist one, and it is doing the smallest job. These are real builds, not mockups.
What is being compared
The app addresses type through three roles — display, body, mono — so a system swaps all three at once and no call site changes. Mono is identical in all four, which keeps the comparison about display and body.
| System | Display / body | Launch flag |
|---|---|---|
| Current | Space Grotesk / Barlow | -type=current |
| Warm sans | Archivo / Source Sans 3 | -type=warmSans |
| Editorial | Fraunces / Source Sans 3 | -type=editorial |
| Hybrid | Fraunces heroes / Archivo labels / Source Sans 3 | -type=hybrid |
Hybrid did not exist when you asked. I added it after seeing Fraunces at label sizes: a serif carries character at 22pt and up, and gets busy below that. Hybrid uses Fraunces for hero-scale display only and Archivo underneath.
Detail: where the difference actually lives
Hero headline + blurb
Home · exchange card. The largest display type in the app, over the body face.
The wordmark
Home header. One word, seen every launch.
Section header
13pt display, uppercase, letterspaced. Where a serif gets busy.
Change-feed row
15pt display headline in a compact card — the smallest display size in use.
Board title
Brand board, large navigation title.
Route card
All three roles at once: display, body, and the unchanged mono readouts.
Full screens
Home
Brand board
My read
Current
Space Grotesk / Barlow
Competent and cool. Tight apertures, squarish bowls, a slightly technical air. Barlow is narrow and mechanical at 13–15pt, which is most of the pixels in this app.
Warm sans
Archivo / Source Sans 3
The safe improvement. Source Sans 3 is genuinely humanist and noticeably more open at body sizes. Archivo is warmer than Space Grotesk without changing the register. Lowest risk, least distinctive.
Editorial
Fraunces / Source Sans 3
Real character, and it matches the field-guide register the product is reaching for. It falls down at label sizes: serif small-caps section headers read heavy and dated, and the 15pt feed headline gets noisy.
Hybrid
Fraunces heroes / Archivo labels / Source Sans 3
Takes the character and leaves the busyness. The wordmark and hero headlines get Fraunces; section headers, row titles, and feed headlines stay clean. The body face does the warming.
Why hybrid rather than editorial
Compare the section-header row above. Editorial sets SHOP BY CATEGORY in letterspaced serif caps, which reads like a 2012 restaurant menu. Hybrid sets the same label in Archivo and keeps Fraunces for the two places a serif earns its keep: the wordmark and the hero headline. One switch on point size does it, and that switch already exists for the width axis.
Three things to weigh before you pick
- The body face matters more than the display face. Body type is most of the pixels. Source Sans 3 appears in three of the four candidates, so if warmth is the goal, that swap delivers most of it regardless of what sits on top.
- Warm sans narrows hero headlines to
wdth89, matching the condensed headlines in your no-photography mockup. That is one extra variable in the comparison, so it looks tighter than the others partly for a reason unrelated to warmth. - The spec still says sentence case and no letterspaced all-caps. Section headers are already letterspaced caps in the shipping app, so the spec and the build already disagree. Whichever system wins, that line needs settling.
Cost of the change
Small, and reversible. TypeSystem.active selects a system; every candidate is
built from variable fonts already bundled. Picking a winner means deleting the other cases
and the fonts they use, which is a subtraction rather than a rewrite.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| New files | Theme/TypeSystem.swift, three .ttf files in Resources/Fonts/ |
| Changed | Theme/Fonts.swift — role builders now switch on the active system |
| Call sites touched | None. .display(), .bodyText(), .mono() are unchanged. |
| Bundle cost | Archivo 643KB, Source Sans 3 631KB, Fraunces 352KB. Dropping the losing faces recovers most of it. |
| Licence | All three are SIL Open Font License, same as the current three. |
Next
Tell me which one, and I will delete the other three cases, remove the unused font files,
update the design-system section of basefox-spec-v03.md, and settle the
sentence-case question at the same time. Then back to the card visuals.