Earlier this summer, Netherlands-based type design studio Typotheque released Zed, an ambitious sans-serif typeface that aims to bring the world together. The team designed the award-winning Zed (Gold at the European Design Awards) with inclusivity and accessibility in mind for the communication and design needs of the 21st century.
Unlike the typical 20th-century typeface, often a series of compromises designed to work in a narrow context, describes the Typotheque website,* Zed was created to be inclusive, to “address situations where people are excluded from using certain technologies.” This exclusion can manifest in people with low vision, and it can happen in marginalized linguistic communities.
*Speaking of said website, Typotheque highlights Zed’s attributes against a background of gorgeous 3D renderings of extinct plants created by an artist, Andrea Phillipon, based on surviving drawings.
Zed features a series of adaptations between display and text for readability and accessibility. These include open counters for body text for deciphering at a glance; in the display version, closed counters emphasize letter similarity and flow. You’ll notice display-to-body text adaptations from the spacing to the extenders to the contrast. Not only is Zed adaptable for readers of all kinds, but it also has versatility for today’s designers. Play with three dimensions (weight, width, and skew) along any point on the axes—the family offers 558 defined fonts. This number doesn’t include the options that arise from the dimensions of rounding and optical size. The possibilities are impressive.
Rooted in research and science, the Typotheque team carried out lab tests in collaboration with the National Center for Ophthalmology in France to determine the right letter proportions for readers with low vision due to age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, peripheral vision loss, etc. The result is as accessible to these communities as it is to people with full vision.
The team also designed a Braille glyph set.
The design team’s research and collaboration with native speakers is another aspect of Zed’s accessibility. At first release, Zed supports 435 languages, with a particular focus on Indigenous North American and African languages that use the Roman alphabet. Of note is Zed’s support of the Wakashan and Salishan Indigenous languages of British Columbia. The team worked closely with Indigenous language keepers and drafted a proposal to permanently render these characters in The Unicode Standard (proposal accepted for inclusion in 16.0).
Typotheque isn’t finished with Zed, either. Further support is coming for 22 additional writing scripts, from Arabic to Thai (covering hundreds, if not thousands of additional languages). Interestingly, many world language scripts already use different letterform construction between large and small text. Here’s a sample of this exploration for two optical versions in Thai.
When words cannot bridge the language gap, the team’s next release will feature hundreds of symbols and pictograms in various weights and visual styles that work with the Zed font family. Zed Icons is due to drop this fall.
Explore more fascinating process and research content on Typotheque’s blog, and read about and test drive Zed.
Images and video courtesy of Typotheque.