Unforged brand book, type

Three voices, two families

Barlow Condensed and Barlow are one superfamily and share every vertical metric, so both sit on one line box. Big Shoulders Display is the second family, a tenth of an em taller in the caps, seven percent narrower, and it fills the steps between 12 and 72 pixels where the condensed voice would shout and the text voice would mumble.

The three voices and where each one renders
Custom property	Face	Weights	Case	Renders at
`--u-font-display`	Barlow Condensed	900 only	Uppercase always	title, display, poster
`--u-font-display2`	Big Shoulders Display	800 and 600	Uppercase always	label, head, subtitle
`--u-font-text`	Barlow	400, 500, 700	Sentence always	caption, body, head-text

The register rule is steps, and the steps are numbers

Barlow Condensed never renders under 36 pixels. Under that the condensed voice becomes a sentence voice.
Barlow never renders over 36 pixels. Over that the normal width competes with the display voices.
Big Shoulders renders at three steps only, between 12 and 72 pixels. It is a set of steps, not a range a surface may pick inside.
No voice sets a case that is not its own. One case per voice, so a reader tells the voices apart before reading a word.
Big Shoulders may never set a sentence, body copy, a numeric column or a flush line.

Since the second voice arrived, a size alone no longer names the face: head and head-text share one clamp, and subtitle's ceiling sits four pixels under title's floor at 1280. The step names the voice.

The scale, every step

Nine steps. Each is a clamp between 390 and 1280 pixels of viewport, both ends binding. Below 390 the minimum holds, so at 320 every step is its 390 value. A size between two steps is a component the identity does not have.

Label, the eyebrow and the table head

12 and 13px. Big Shoulders 600, uppercase, leading 1.3, tracking 0.14em. Labels, eyebrows, table heads, axes, kickers, the action label. 12px is the floor of the whole system; nothing renders smaller.

Caption, the source line under a number

14 and 15px. Barlow 400, sentence case, leading 1.45. Figure captions, source lines, table cells. This is also the house code block, because no monospace exists.

Body, the running prose of every surface. Seventeen pixels on a phone and eighteen on a desktop, on a line box of twenty six and twenty eight pixels, across a measure that wraps at a seventy character median.

17 and 18px. Barlow 400, sentence case. Leading is the one length in the scale, 26 and 28px, the same clamp as the paragraph space, so every space step is a whole number of line boxes. The ratios are 1.529 and 1.556.

Head-text, the sub head of a document

26 and 36px. Barlow 700, sentence case, leading 1.15. The ceiling of the sentence voice. The head of the audit surface and the closing line of a colophon.

Head, the brand surface head

26 and 36px. Big Shoulders 800, uppercase, leading 1.0. Section head, module head, method name. The default head on a brand surface. Head and head-text share one clamp and differ in face, weight and leading.

Subtitle

32 and 72px. Big Shoulders 800, uppercase, leading 0.95, tracking 0. The line under a title, the second line of a plate, the head of a deck slide. Never on the audit cover.

Title

40 and 76px. Barlow Condensed 900, uppercase, leading 0.9. Section headline and method numerals. This is the audit's cap: the audit never goes louder. Told apart from subtitle by face, never by size, because at 1280 they sit four pixels apart.

60 and 136px. Barlow Condensed 900, uppercase, leading 0.82. The plate headline, the hero block's cap. Not available on the audit. As a class it renders the clamp; in a flush block it is a ceiling the solver may not pass.

72 and 200px. Barlow Condensed 900, uppercase, leading 0.82. The hero slab, the social frame, the flood plate. The loudest value in the system. Not available on the audit.

Four things the scale is doing on purpose

Nothing under head steps by more than 1.2. The two doublings, body to head and head to subtitle, are exactly where the page changes voice.
Every leading clears its face's ink span, measured off the font files. Sentence case in either display voice would put descenders in contact, which is one more reason both are uppercase always.
Tabular figures on every numeric column, and no numeric column at a Big Shoulders step: that face has no tabular figures and cannot be given them. A label may carry a figure. A column of figures is caption or body in Barlow.
Reflow at 320 is stated, not hoped. The longest realistic words were set at every step in a 280 pixel column, with and without the forced text spacing an accessibility setting can impose, and the numbers are in the typography document.

Measure

Three measures, and what each one was measured against
Token	Value	What it resolves to, and why
measure.prose	56ch	538 and 570px. A greedy wrap of 6,026 characters of real prose set a 70 character median and a 78 maximum. The widest value whose median sits inside 45 to 75 with room.
measure.narrow	40ch	A 50 character median. Closing sections, where the page reads as a letter.
measure.document	72rem	1152px, twelve columns at 1280 inside 64 pixel margins. The page container.

A trap worth knowing. The ch unit is the width of the figure zero at the element's own size, so 56ch at the title step is 1953 pixels, not 570. The two reading measures are therefore resolved once on the body and inherited as lengths. A head, a title or a flush block that asks for the prose measure gets the body's column, not 56 of its own zeros.

The flush block, worked

This is the one ownable device beyond the logo. Every line of a flush block is set at whatever size fills 96 to 100 percent of its measure, solved from the font's own advance widths and then capped by the scale. Short lines set huge, long lines set smaller, and the block lands flush to both edges of the column.

The slogan, set as the house flush block at the prose measure

Stop being the best-kept secret.

Resize this window and watch the three lines stay flush to both edges while their sizes change against each other. Nothing here is a media query and nothing here is a font size in a stylesheet.

The numbers behind those three lines

What the solver sets, at the two viewports the identity measures at
Line	In the 350px column at 390	In the 1152px column at 1280	What binds it
STOP BEING	81.4px	268px uncapped	The measure at the small end, the poster ceiling at the large end.
THE BEST-KEPT	60.3px	under the ceiling	The longest line, so it sets the smallest. That is the device working, not the device failing.
SECRET.	114.3px, capped at 60 or 72	376px uncapped, capped at 200	The shortest line wants to be the loudest. The display and poster caps are what stop it.

Read the table once and the device is obvious. The measure sizes the line at the small end. The scale caps it at the large end. Between those two the block is self solving, so a display headline can never overflow a column at any width, 320 included, and the slogan fits a 390 pixel phone by construction rather than by a rule somebody has to remember.

Fill Every flush line fills 96 to 100 percent of its measure and none exceeds its step's cap. Under 96 percent the block stops reading as one slab. The cap is the ceiling of loudness.
Overflow A display line never overflows its column at any width. The solver reads the column first. The slogan at the display step fitting a 390 viewport was a criterion the direction had to pass.
Forced spacing The solver runs with the accessibility forced letter spacing inside its width arithmetic, so the spaced render is the render. A block that only fits when nobody changes their settings is not a block that fits.
Two settings, one block A long line that fills a 1152 pixel column at 86 pixels would fill a 350 pixel column at 26. Below the house breakpoint the block carries the same words on more lines. No line may set under the 36 pixel register floor, so the block re-breaks rather than shrinking through it.
Voice The solver serves the condensed voice only. A flush line in Big Shoulders is zero by rule. Display and poster are caps consumed by the solver, not sizes a surface picks.
Title, the one exception Title is the one display step a surface may set without the solver, and its reflow number is stated rather than hidden. Under forced spacing a long title at 320 needs 309.7 pixels in a 280 pixel column. A surface either flush solves its title lines or lets the words break anywhere. The floor is not lowered to hide the number.

The absences

Two things are missing on purpose, and the absence is the enforcement.

No monospace

There is no monospace token, so there is nothing to reach for. A client literal, meaning a quoted line of the client's own words, is set in Barlow 500. A code span on a house surface is the text voice at the caption step.

A monospaced label is the loudest signal that a document was made by a machine for a machine. Human craft visible, AI invisible.

No italic

No italic file is hosted for any face, and the base stylesheet turns off every element the browser would otherwise slant. Emphasis is Barlow 500.

A synthesised italic is a fake letterform. If the system does not have it, the system does not fake it.

Also zero: uppercase in the text voice, a numeric column at a Big Shoulders step, a flush line in Big Shoulders, and any variable font setting in a house stylesheet. A surface asks for weight 600 or 800 and nothing between.

Licence and hosting

Barlow Condensed and Barlow are Jeremy Tribby, Big Shoulders Display is Patric King. All three are under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1 and the licence text sits beside the files.

Ten woff2 files, 164,220 bytes for the whole identity, self hosted in 02_TOKENS/fonts/ and generated by 05_TOOLS/fetch-fonts.mjs, never edited by hand. A house surface never requests a font from any host but its own. A private client surface that calls a third party on load is a confidentiality problem before it is a performance one.

What the licence permits

Self host and subset, one licence across every client domain, embed in a PDF sold to a client, hand the files to a freelancer. No fee, no domain counting. The licence does not extend to documents made with the font.