Why Ari runs on Cormorant Garamond.

Open the studio's marketing site, the Journal, the Manifesto, any of the long-form pages on this domain — and the first thing the page does is reach for Cormorant Garamond. The display sets in it. The body sets in it. The little italic flourishes that pepper the prose are the same face's italic, not a sibling.

This was not the first plan. The first plan was, predictably, Inter. The second plan was Inter, but more italic. The third plan involved Söhne. By the time we were drafting the brand book in late February, the working title for the typography page was "please not Inter."

The case for Cormorant.

Three things, in order of seriousness.

The first is that Cormorant Garamond is a display Garamond — a revival drawn by Christian Thalmann that exaggerates the contrast and pulls the proportions taller than a working-text Garamond would. It is gorgeous at 84px. It is fine at 18px. It is the wrong choice for setting a novel; it is exactly the right choice for a sixty-line landing page that is half headline and half whisper.

The second is that the italic does almost all of the work. Ari, in our hand, is always italic. Look anywhere on the site and the brand name leans. It is the single typographic gesture that holds everything else in place. Cormorant's italic is one of the most beautiful italics on the open-source shelf — high stress, generous swashes on the lowercase, a j that descends like it has been waiting all day to descend. We needed that j.

The third is that it is on Google Fonts, free, and small. We don't have a foundry budget. We don't want one.

What we paired it with.

The mono is IBM Plex Mono. We tried Berkeley first (too expensive), then JetBrains Mono (too programmer), then Söhne Mono (too expensive), then Inconsolata (too thin), then finally Plex. Plex is the mono that lives in our nav, our eyebrows, our captions, our terminal mockup of AriCode. It carries the role of the voice that announces things. The serif is the prose. The mono is the label on the prose.

The eyebrows on this site are eleven or twelve pixels of IBM Plex Mono, letter-spaced to about 0.24em, uppercase, with a quiet sepia or lavender tint depending on the section. A FAMILY OF SMALL THINGS. SCROLL INTO NIGHT. EST. MMXXVI · MANCHESTER, UK. They are the seams of the website — the bits where it admits, briefly, that it is a website.

Italic discipline.

The harder part has been deciding what is italic and what isn't. The temptation, when you have a beautiful italic, is to italicise everything. We have a rule, which we mostly keep.

• Product names are italic. Ari, AriCore, AriRoam, AriCode, AriDesk.
• Emphasised words inside body prose are italic — but no more than two per paragraph, usually.
• Headlines have at most one italic word, usually the verb. Make the small things. Quieter. Friend, in the cream of the page.
• Captions, eyebrows, status pills are mono and never italic.

The discipline is to leave the rest upright. Italic only works as a chord if there's some upright text around it for it to lean against.

Why not Inter.

Inter is a wonderful sans. Half the products we admire are set in Inter. Linear is Inter. Vercel is Inter. Notion is Inter. Every dashboard with a sidebar is Inter.

And that is the answer. Inter has become the typographic vocabulary of the software dashboard — neutral, capable, slightly cold, designed to recede so the UI can act. We are not building a software dashboard. We are building a small studio that wants to feel like a book — like the back-of-shop room where the editor sits, not the open-plan floor where the salespeople sit.

So: an editorial face for an editorial studio. Cormorant for the prose. Plex Mono for the seams. No sans at all on the marketing site, anywhere, on purpose.

(The apps themselves, you'll notice, use a different palette — Manrope and Lora inside AriRoam, a quieter sans inside AriCore. The product is allowed to be a sans. The studio insists on being a serif. There is, somewhere in this distinction, the entire argument.)

— A.