Type systems for teams, not designers

Identity

15 Jan 2026

7 min read

Three sizes and two weights will carry a company further than a scale of eleven, because a scale is a set of options and a system is a set of decisions already made.

A typographic scale with eleven steps is a pleasure to draw and an invitation to guess. Presented with eleven options and no training, people choose by eye, and by eye means slightly bigger than the last one.

The eleven-step scale is not wrong. It is simply designed for a reader who does not work there.

Three sizes and two weights, named for what they do rather than how big they are. Not display, heading one, heading two, subhead — but page title, section title, body and note. Anyone can place those correctly without exercising judgement, which is the entire point.

The rules that go with them fit on a card:

That is the whole system for ninety per cent of what a company produces.

A scale is a set of options. A system is a set of decisions already made.

Type notes, January

The full scale still exists and designers still use it. It lives in the design tool rather than in the templates, and it carries a note saying that anything set outside the three sizes needs a reason someone else could repeat.

That has not been restrictive in practice. Campaign work and editorial pages use the wider range constantly. What changed is that the four hundred everyday documents — decks, ads, job posts, invoices — stopped drifting, because there was nothing to drift within.

Two years in, the drift we measured on the previous system, roughly nine unauthorised sizes a quarter across the marketing team, is down to two, and both of those turned out to be reasonable.

Pl. 02  Type card, second edition

None of it works as a document. The three sizes are the only text styles that exist in the shared templates, and the eleven-step scale is not installed on machines that do not need it. Availability is the policy.

We fought this for a while, on the grounds that removing options is patronising. It is not. The people using these files are doing a different job under time pressure, and giving them fewer, better decisions is the same courtesy we would want extended to us.

Name the sizes in the client’s own vocabulary rather than ours. We shipped page title to a company that says headline internally, and for six months everyone translated in their heads before choosing, which is exactly the friction the system was meant to remove.