Nuzz
Sans.
A geometric sans with an unusually tall lowercase, which is most of why it stays legible when it gets small. Drawn as a specimen sheet, traced to outlines, regularised, spaced, and compiled into two weights. Forty kilobytes for the pair, served from this domain, with no request to anybody else’s server.
Stem 118 / 1000. Every paragraph on this site, including this one, and every figure on a spec table.
$89 · 15µm · 2.0 L
Stem 165 / 1000, grown from the Regular outlines rather than drawn as a second design. Headlines, product names, prices.
The pump is the part that wears out.
Three things make it readable.
A brand that publishes its measurements should not be setting them in a face that four thousand other shops are also using this year.
The x-height is 539 against a cap of 700, which is 0.77. Most geometric sans faces sit nearer 0.55. The lowercase fills more of the line, so small text keeps its shape instead of collapsing into a grey smudge.
o c e b d p q g are built on near-true circles with wide apertures. The hole inside a letter is what the eye actually reads, so the holes are kept large and the strokes kept even.
The l carries a tail, the i is a plain stem, the a is double storey and the g is single storey. Nothing collapses into anything else, which is the failure that makes a face tiring rather than merely plain.
You can have it too.
Three licences, one typeface, two weights. Read the four things it does not have before you read the prices, because they are the whole reason it costs what it does.
Make things with it
Install on up to 5 computers. Print, packaging, logos, products, client work. You may register a logo made with it as a trademark.
Set a website in it
Self host the webfont on one domain, up to 500,000 pageviews a month. Serve it from your own domain, not from a public CDN.
Both, and an app
Desktop and web together, 10 computers, 2,000,000 pageviews, plus embedding in one application or ebook you publish.
Every licence is perpetual for the version you buy, and thirty days refundable even after you have downloaded it. The files arrive as a zip with your name and licence number written into the agreement inside.
What you may do
Use it in work you are paid for, including for clients. Modify the files for your own use, including drawing the accents it is missing. Convert formats. Put it in a logo and trademark that logo.
What you may not
Pass the font files on, modified or not. A client gets the artwork, not the files. Do not serve the webfont from a public CDN, and do not use it to build a competing typeface and sell that.
Put in the address you bought with. Fresh links go out straight away, the download count resets, and nobody has to read a message or approve anything. Your licence never expires; only the link does.
One thing we would rather say than have you notice: the two webfont files that set this very site are public, because every webfont on every site is. What a licence buys you is the right to use them, the desktop OTFs that are not published anywhere, and a document with your name on it. We are not going to pretend a webfont can be locked.
What this family does not have yet.
No italics.
There is no sloped or true italic cut. Where the site needs emphasis it uses the Bold weight. Nothing is faux-slanted, because a sheared geometric sans looks broken rather than italic.
Latin only.
103 glyphs, 102 of them characters you can actually type: English, the figures, and the punctuation this site sets. No accented characters, so no French, Spanish or German without adding them first.
Kerning is a first pass.
152 pairs, covering the ones that show: AV, Ta, Yo, Lw, r followed by a full stop, and the figures. It is not a full kerning set, and a few odd pairs will sit loose.
Hinting is absent.
Fine on any modern screen. On an old Windows machine at small sizes the stems may render unevenly, which is the usual trade for an unhinted face.
Nobody else
has this.
Which, in a category where every shop sells the same objects out of the same warehouses, is not nothing.