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Common Name Website

Contributed by Indra Kupferschmid on Dec 13th, 2013. Artwork published in .
Common Name Website 1
License: All Rights Reserved.

This is one of the rare occasions (or maybe even the first time) I see Monotype Grotesque used as webfonts on a website. I like this typeface a lot, especially for all the inconsistencies across weights and styles, and I think it fits Common Name, a graphic design studio based in New York, very well.

The tricky thing about the used Bold style though is the protrudingly large capital letters (less so in the lighter weight that is used for captions). The spacing is rather loose, as the fonts were probably once meant for text sizes. Both of these features together result in quite flickering, uneven looking text (at least on my retina display). As we see in the acronym- and name-heavy copy here, this is especially problematic in texts where a lot of words begin with a capital letter, like for instance in German. I never noticed this this pronouncedly when I saw Mono Grot Bold in print. 

Common Name Website 2
License: All Rights Reserved.
Common Name Website 3
License: All Rights Reserved.
Common Name Website 4
License: All Rights Reserved.
Common Name Website 5
License: All Rights Reserved.

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1 Comment on “Common Name Website”

  1. I ran into a similar problem recently: In Štorm’s Dyna Grotesk, single caps are fine. However, when they gather in acronyms, the caps tend to stand out. Same is true for figures.

    In other genres, this issue can be solved with small caps and oldstyle figures. Such features are rarely available — nor suitable — in classic grotesques. The good thing is that Dyna Grotesk comes in such a wide range of weights and widths. I reverted to a slightly more condensed gradation for all-cap strings and figures. Thanks to GREP, this can be accomplished document-wide in a minute.

    Left: Dyna Grotesk DE
    Right: Dyna Grotesk DE with Dyna Grotesk D for the otherwise too dominant bits

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