Story Sans design information
Story Sans is a screen-first sans serif designed for Trade Me. Based on Akzidenz-Grotesk it’s unpretentious and hardworking, aligned to the brand’s values and tone of voice.
Story Sans is a new font family designed for Trade Me — a screen-first, grotesk typeface aligned to their brand, values and tone of voice. It was designed with Trade Me’s internal design team,¹ and is licensed exclusively for Trade Me; currently it’s in use on their preview and Ping sites.
The Trade Me design team was lead by Roxy Huntington and Duncan Forbes, with enthusiastic help from Kendyl Bird, Alister Coyne, Denny Ford, Matthew Kerr, Mark McIntosh, Sean van Oossanen, Rachel Radford, Gili Sharrock, Zac Sanderson-Harris and Angela Watkins. Story Sans was named by Logan Mudge from the Trade Me comm’s team.⤴
Trade Me is a household name in New Zealand. Started in 1999 by Sam Morgan, it was “a novel concept; people sending money to sellers they’ve never met, for goods they’ve never seen”. The website accounts for a large chunk of New Zealand’s domestic internet traffic. What started as a site for buying and selling secondhand stuff has grown into a portfolio of businesses.
In 2015, Trade Me began a massive rebrand and redesign project. According to Trade Me:
Our brand had grown in a pretty organic way since Sam Morgan founded the company. Unfortunately this didn’t always result in an intentional and cohesive result across such a large company and multiple products. We wanted to develop our brand, make it more consistent, and make sure we’re protecting and nurturing it as best we can. We felt we needed to evolve to better reflect the contemporary Trade Me and where we’re headed next.
As part of their new direction they wanted a new custom typeface to represent the Trade Me family into the future.
We started talking about the typeface in June 2016. The brief that came out of these informal discussions detailed the screen-first technical and functional requirements: a sans serif that works well at small sizes, looks good at large sizes, has clear numerals and matches system fallback fonts. It also opened with: “The typeface should embody both our Trade Me brand tone of voice and brand personality.” This posed a fascinating question — what typeface is Trade Me?
The history of typefaces is rich and varied: there’s a smorgasbord of genres, styles, and letterforms to choose from. The brief narrowed the selection to sans serif. It’s a solid, logical choice. Sans serif is one of the oldest forms of lettering, but paradoxically one of the newest forms of printing type. A sans serif still feels modern.
I started with a careful analysis of Trade Me’s brief, values and a selection of typeface examples the Trade Me team liked.² I narrowed down their selection into three sans-serif subgenres, and chose an archetypal typeface to represent each:
- Grotesk — Akzidenz-Grotesk
- Geometric — Futura
- Neo-Grotesk — Helvetica
We then examined the history and use of each (below) to determine the best match for Trade Me’s brand.
The typefaces the team liked were: Unica77, National, Calibre, Circular, Theinhardt, Graphik, DIN, Avenir and Neuzeit Office.⤴
1. Akzidenz-Grotesk
Caslon’s Two Lines English, 1816.
The first sans serif printing type was Caslon’s Two Lines English in 1816. It was in uppercase only; it took nearly two decades for a sans-serif lowercase to be designed. Most of the development was happening in America and Germany.
Breite Grotesk, Bauersche Gießerei, 1909.
This is an early range of sans serifs from the 1850s, arranged in a 1909 specimen book from Bauersche Gießerei. The foundry is marketing them as a unified set named “Breite Grotesk”.
14pt Breite Grotesk (top) compared to 40pt (bottom).
To contemporary eyes these are clearly different; however, combining relatively different typefaces into a set wasn’t an unusual strategy at the time. What we now know as Akzidenz-Grotesk was one of the first set of fonts marketed as a “type family”. It is actually a collection of individual typefaces, cut across a range of sizes by largely anonymous punch-cutters.
Akzidenz-Grotesk Halbfett, Berthold Schriftprobe Nr. 405, c. 1950.
In the printing trade »Akzidenzen« meant occasional printed matter — everyday things like business and greeting cards, flyers, posters, handbills, timetables and forms. Akzidenz-Grotesk was a humble typeface used for everyday needs.
Jan Tschichold, in his 1928 book Die neue Typography, wrote:
Among all the types that are available, the so-called “Grotesque” is the only one in spiritual accordance with our time.
He liked the genuine, original grotesks like Akzidenz-Grotesk. Geometric sans serifs (like Futura) were too “designed” for his eye.
2. Futura
Futura was designed by Paul Renner in 1927. According to Bauer Type Foundry marketing, it was »die Schrift unserer Zeit« — “the typeface of our time”. But what was actually going on during the 1920s? Change was blowing through the nascent profession of graphic design. Rationality, order and grids had become fashionable. Influential designers and design schools like the Bauhaus fixated on the supposed purity of geometry, specifically the most elemental of forms: the circle, square and triangle.
Herbert Bayer’s Universal Alphabet. From “The Visible Word”, 1969.
Herbert Bayer made this lettering (above) in the early 1920s. It was a fairly typical approach for the time, and clearly illustrates the problems designers run into when they try to impose hard geometry onto soft letterforms. The result is a charming but clunky set of compromised type, perfectly illustrating the adage:
A typeface is a beautiful collection of letters, not a collection of beautiful letters.
A typeface has to work as a whole, which is why Futura is such a remarkable typeface: Renner and the Stempel foundry skilfully combined the appearance of geometry in letterforms — a feat not achieved before. The way the Futura letterforms have been constructed is lovely: the small x-height, the generous warm curves, and human details like the round tittles and punctuation.³
3. “Renner’s pride in Futura was evident, and he still maintained that it was a ‘serifless roman’, and not a grotesk.” — pp 196, Paul Renner: The Art of Typography. It’s been a decade since I read this quote and it still spins me out. Such delicious cognitive dissonance.⤴
Futura Halbfett & Drieviertelfett, Futura specimen, 1952.
For such a rational typeface, however, many compromises were made with Futura. The sharp points of the A M and N have to be blunt in the bolder weights to stop them clogging up. The terminal treatment of the c g and s is irrationally inconsistent. Renner also had to bow to the necessary optical corrections in letterforms; it’s been said before but bears repeating: Futura’s O is not a perfect circle.
The typeface could have been rushed, but Renner and Hartmann were not content until many trial versions had been rejected in the interests of achieving the subtle design features that gave the appearance of true geometric letterforms.