I’m sticking with personal blogs on today’s edition of my cool type-pairing series.
Erin Kissane
Erin Kissane’s website exclusively uses typefaces from MB Type, where “MB” is lawyer and type designer Matthew Butterick. Erin’s site uses Valkyrie for body text and Heliotrope for the logo and website microcopy (site menu, metadata, etc).
Screenshot from Erin Kissane’s website of a blog post titled, “Untangling Threads”.
Valkyrie is a modern calligraphic serif inspired partly by Palatino and Heliotrope is a semi-serif inspired partly by Albertus and Optima.
James Cridland
Where Erin used paid typefaces from Matthew Butterick on her website, James Cridland goes in the opposite direction: his website uses the free and open-source Charter (Bitstream, Matthew Carter) for body text and your browser’s default sans-serif font for headings, menus, and the footer.
Screenshot from James Cridland’s website of a blog post titled, “Radio in car: shock new figures”.
You can download a limited version of Charter from, funnily enough, Matthew Butterick’s website. If you want a fully fleshed out version of Charter you can purchase a licence to its Pro version, but I recommend you use Charis (SIL) instead. Charis is based on Charter but it has a complete character set, supports more languages, and is available for free under the SIL Open Font License.
Oh, and if you’re wondering, the heading typeface in the screenshot above is in Noto Sans (Google) since that’s my browser’s default sans-serif font (I use Firefox on MX Linux).
Dan Sinker
I love Dan Sinker’s website: its design is strong, clean, and very well done. Its layout it simple and effective as well – a feat that isn’t easy to pull off. Dan’s site uses Gelica (Dave Rowland) for body text, Cooper Std (Adobe) for titles and headings, and your browser’s default sans-serif font for the menu and footer.
Screenshot from Dan Sinker’s website of a blog post titled, “What If We Just Stopped?”.
Cooper Std is a display-only typeface and Gelica pairs beautifully with it because they both have the same vibe.
Nick Simonson
Finally we have Nick Simonson’s website. Nick is a graphic and UI designer and his site uses Def Sans (Public Type Works) for body text, Dinger (Dingbat XYZ) for headings, and Commit Mono (Eigil Nikolajsen) for tags and monospace text.
Screenshot from Nick Simonson’s website of a blog post titled, “Dolly and us”.
What’s next?
After showcasing two batches of personal blogs, in the next instalment of this series I’m going to move on to online publications and company websites.
PS. In case you missed my note from the first post in this series: all the screenshots featured here are edited and transformed to focus on just the typography used on each website – meaning almost all graphic and site-layout elements have been edited out. So don’t be surprised if you follow the website links and find something that looks a little different!