Sphere
Sans
A grotesk with a sphere in it, drawn around the tile that makes our mark.
(01)Origin
The sphere is already a letter.
Our mark is a sphere built from tiles. Every tile is the same shape, a square that gives in at the corners until it almost becomes a circle. Sphere Sans takes that one shape and puts it where a grotesk has round parts. The dots. The closed bowls. The ring.
One curve family runs through the whole face. A circle is the case where the exponent is two. Push it up and the sides flatten while the corners stay soft. The mark’s tile sits at about 2.4. Sphere Sans keeps its closed bowls a touch softer than the tile, so they still read as round beside every other letter, and draws its dots firmer, where the tile can show.
- n = 2A circle. Where most grotesks stop.
- n = 2.25Sphere Sans bowls. O, o, Q, 0, Ø, degree, ring.
- n = 2.8Sphere Sans dots. i, j, punctuation, umlauts, bullet.
- n = 6Nearly a square. Too far, and it stops being a grotesk.
(02)Weights
Six weights, two spacings.
The text family is spaced for paragraphs and interface copy. Display shares the outlines and closes the spacing for headlines, so large sizes never need manual tracking.
(03)Wordmark
Studio Sphere, set in its own face.
The wordmark is Sphere Sans Display at 450, a step lighter than Medium, with the trademark at the same height as before. Nothing else is drawn by hand. The tile shows in the two o’s and the i, and that is enough for it to be ours.
(04)Colour
Six colours, one loud, one cold, four quiet.
#FF5100
#00FFBB
#948A8A
#554343
#292121
#242424
(05)Character set
Latin extended, for every market we work in.
Tabular and proportional figures, fractions, superiors, case sensitive punctuation. The sphere mark ships inside the font on the black circle character, so it can sit in running text at the right weight.
(06)In use
Big, it carries the mark. Small, it gets out of the way.
Products
and brands,
designed and built.
The numerals are a plain modernist set with room on both sides, the zero carries the sphere.
Navigation at 15 px. The dots and the O still read as ours, nothing else asks for attention.
Your engineers can build anything. Nobody has decided what it should be. The founders who get this right stop treating design as something to order in and make it a seat at the table. Someone with an opinion before you ask for one, who can tell a finished thing from a merely done one, and who will kill a good idea to protect a better one.
Sphere Sans Regular, 13 px, line height 1.45, tabular figures. 0123456789. At this size the bowls read as plain rounds; the tile shows from about 24 px up.
(07)Specifications
Two families, six weights each.
Technical
(08)Brand assets
The mark, the wordmark and the colours, as files.
Download
Use them as they are. Keep the mark’s proportions, keep the wordmark whole, and give both clear space of at least the height of the mark. The typeface is not part of the kit.