Typotheque: Zed font system for information accessibility.

A sans for the needs of the 21st century.

Concept

Most 20th-century sans-serif typefaces are design compromises – they tend to be display typefaces that also have to work in text settings. Zed directly addresses this shortcoming, with radically different text and display versions developed using the latest research into which letterforms are found the easiest to read by the widest range of readers.

Zed is designed to be inclusive; in particular, it identifies and addresses situations where people are excluded from using certain technologies. We have tested the typefaces with help from visually impaired readers and have worked with marginalised linguistic communities and native designers around the world. As a result, Zed is a highly accessible typeface for diverse populations. See also this detailed printed type specimen.

The Text version uses open counters to prevent confusion, allowing a reader to accurately decipher text at a glance. The Display version has fully formed counters that emphasise letter similarities and create a pleasant text rhythm in large sizes.

Loose spacing is probably the most important attribute of a text typeface and the Text version not only has open forms that are easier to distinguish in text, but also plenty of white space around the letters to avoid character crowding.

The Display version has unusually low contrast, with horizontals taking 90% of the vertical stem thickness. The Text version has increased contrast, 80% of the verticals, which makes text clearer in small sizes.

At large sizes, sans-serif typefaces look great when they are tightly spaced, creating compact but not-quite-touching combinations of letters. Long text in small point sizes requires sufficient white space around the letters that makes text easy to read.

The Text version has slightly higher x-height, and extenders (ascenders and descenders) have increased in size to allow fully formed shapes such as ‘f’ and ‘g’ in the darkest cuts.

A sans for small text … and large.

At large sizes, sans-serif typefaces look great when they are tightly spaced, creating compact but not-quite-touching combinations of letters. This aesthetic was first seen in the 1960s, made possible by the introduction of phototypesetting. However, reducing letter spacing to an absolute minimum means that the same fonts work poorly in small point sizes. Long text in small point sizes requires sufficient white space around the letters if character crowding is to be avoided, hence most typefaces require a choice to be made between small text and large text.

Zed requires no such choice: it is an uncompromising typeface family with two optical versions. The display version is tightly spaced, which enhances its rhythmic, repeated forms and results in an aesthetically pleasing text. The text version, on the other hand, has open counterforms, lower contrast, a higher x-height, and – most importantly – looser spacing, which significantly improves ease of reading.

Argyroxiphium sandwicense is a remarkable flowering plant endemic to the high-elevation volcanic slopes of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai‘i. Due to habitat destruction, invasive species, and other human-induced threats, Argyroxiphium sandwicense is listed as critically endangered, and it may not survive climate change.

Patient

reaction time (seconds)

Results from the laboratory acuity experiments ran during the development of Zed, used to determine the ideal parameters for the distance reading of Zed Text. Hover the graph to browse the individual data produced by each of the 55 participants that completed the experiment.

Rooted in science

Existing scientific research shows that most people find text that uses simplified morphological letter skeletons, open counters and unambiguous letterforms the easiest to read, and these are the principles we used to design Zed. In addition, we carried out a series of laboratory acuity tests at the National Centre of Ophthalmology in France to determine the ideal letter proportions for their visually impaired patients.

During the tests, Zed Text was directly compared with – and outperformed – Helvetica in terms of speed of reading for all types of hospital patients. We have since further improved the speed and ease of reading by creating wider versions of Zed that benefit readers with declining vision. Zed Text Extra Wide is an exceptionally readable typeface that has been shown to benefit healthy readers as well as those with visual impairments such as age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma or other diseases that severely impair focusing, like keratoconus.

Biscutella rotgesii is a critically endangered plant found only in Corsica, France. It is threatened by habitat loss because of other rapidly spreading invasive plants that emit phytotoxic into the soil. The Corsican language, a key vehicle for local culture, is classified as ‘definitely endangered’ by UNESCO.

Wider, narrower, bolder, rounded, more slanted?

Zed offers unprecedented design possibilities. Imagine a design with three dimensions – weight, width and skew – that allows you to select a style at any point along these axes. This allows you to work with 558 defined fonts, or any interval between them. Then imagine adding another dimension that enables you to round any letter or symbol as you wish. The possibilities multiply. And now imagine adding a fifth dimension, one that controls optical size, whereby the shape and white space of letters can be adjusted to a fixed physical size for optimal legibility. Finally, imagine the cultural dimensions that Zed supports, in relation to most of the world’s scripts. This is the design space occupied by Zed, an unparalleled type system designed with information accessibility in mind.

Acaena exigua is a small flowering plant with a single cone-shaped fruit that was last seen in Hawai‘i in 2000 and is now considered extinct. The reason for extinction is unknown. After English was established as the official language of Hawai‘i in 1896, it displaced the Hawaiian language, which is now critically endangered.

Zed languages — There are 7,164 known languages on this planet, of which 3,523 are considered endangered and unlikely to survive until the next century. This illustration shows geographic location of the endangered languages. The orange dots are languages that are already extinct. Zed aims to support endangered and minority languages worldwide. The language data comes from the Catalogue of Endangered Languages, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Accessible everywhere

This first release of Zed supports 435 languages. In this respect, we have paid particular attention to the Indigenous languages that use the Roman alphabet, such as the orthographies of North American and African languages.

During our research and work with the Indigenous communities in British Columbia, we noticed that some characters required by the Wakashan and Salishan languages were missing, so we drafted a proposal to encode these characters into the Unicode text encoding standard, to facilitate an accurate and complete representation of these languages. Our proposal was accepted for inclusion in Unicode 16.0, and Zed is the first font to include the new characters. However, the updated standard allows anyone to represent these characters in other fonts too.

Of course, the world is diverse, as is the use of writing scripts, and so we are currently working with designers and communities worldwide on further language extensions to support Arabic, Bangla, Canadian Syllabics, Cherokee, Chinese, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Japanese, Kannada, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Malayalam, Meetei, Odia, Ol Chiki, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, and Thai. This makes Zed a truly accessible typeface and demonstrates Typotheque’s commitment to cultural diversity.

Fitchia mangarevensis was a tropical flowering tree found only on the island of Taravai in the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia, and is now extinct because of the loss of natural habitat. The Tuamotuan language spoken there is itself definitely endangered.

Communication without words

There are situations where words or translations are not enough, and in such circumstances icons, symbols and pictograms can be extremely effective. The Zed type system comes with hundreds of icons that break down traditional language barriers, and as with the rest of this type system, these icons are available in a range of weights and visual styles to match the proportions of the typeface employed by the user. Zed Icons is a separate font family that will come out in Autumn 2024.

Braille

To create a truly accessible typeface, we went beyond the visual capacity to include Braille characters in Zed’s glyph set. Designing a Braille font, however, presents a whole new set of challenges, as it serves a group of users with different needs. We undertook an extensive review of literature and recommendations in order to understand the Braille system and its use in different regions. Our research has led to Zed Braille, a companion of Zed that has been carefully crafted with international regulations and recommendations in mind, allowing for the differences in spacing that we found across populations.

To explore the theme of biodiversity and how it intersects with linguistic diversity, we asked French-Swiss artist and 3D designer Andréa Philippon to create highly detailed renderings of endangered and extinct plants native to the regions covered by the initial release of the Zed typeface. This was a challenging project as some of the extinct plants have limited documentation, so Andréa had to use his imagination to complete the missing information. We offer a set of postcards of these renderings.