FontDiscovery 🖼️ 26: Communicate Warmth and Elegance with Dosis
I'm Hua, a designer and bootstrapping founder building Typogram, a brand design tool. As part of running Typogram, I create this digestible weekly guide with fonts, colors, and design ideas to help founders, creators, and makers step up their game in marketing and get creative!
Hi Community 👋
Welcome to FontDiscovery No.26. This is a special issue because I have been running this newsletter for six months. A special gift arrived too. Last week, FontDiscovery was featured on Nexon Jornal, one of the leading independent newspapers in Brazil! Thanks so much for being here every week and motivate me to keep this project going. I hope we keep growing together.
I also want to give a shout-out to two members of our community, Abhijeet and Paul. Abhijeet created these wonderful visuals and shared them on Twitter. Paul was inspired by the ransom note idea from Issue 19 and created a fantastic graphic. Both of you went out of your comfort zone and I hope you keep making awesome things. If you have made something inspired by the newsletter, please share it with me. I would love to feature it!
In This Issue...
Theme: Round elements
Font of the Week: Communicate warmth and elegance with Dosis
Design Idea: Push your concept further with circles as symbols
Color Inspiration: Orphism
img: samples of Dosis
Font of the Week
Rule of Consistency
Do you ever wonder why professional design has that extra magic?
In design school, I learned early on to be visually consistent with everything I do. This soon became an obsession. Today’s font, Dosis, is a result of this visual compulsive disorder. I discovered it while I obsessively searched for a solution.
In design, there are times when you want things to share similar characteristics. Ever noticed how Apple’s UI, like buttons, panels, alerts boxes, all have rounded corners? That’s because they are using the rule of consistency in their design. It has special magic. When all the design elements share a similar visual trait, they look like they belong together in a harmonious system.
img: iOS user interface design language. As you can, round corners are repeated; source: Apple
In my case, I was working on a branding project, and I wanted to try a font with rounded corners in front of a circular shape. This is how I discovered Dosis. Dosis is a sans serif (See issue No.4 to learn more about sans serif) with rounded corners. Its letters also appear to be more condensed than other fonts. The stroke widths are relatively consistent, and there is a strong sense of geometry. The stroke caps are rounded, resulting in a pleasing softness. Its slenderness and oblong shapes speak of modernity, grace, and warmth.
Font Details
- Seven weights to support more complex projects, like websites
- Variable Font support (For a quick review of VF, check out issue No.23)
- Elongated letterforms and rounded stroke caps
- Pairs well with serif like Plex Serif, Piazzolla
img: graphic showing the round stroke caps of Dosis, and its narrow width when compared to fonts like Helvetica
img: Pairing Dosis with Piazzolla
Specific Usage Tips
How to use it for logos?
Dosis is great for brands that want to communicate warmth and grace. A font with rounded stroke caps also works well with other circular shapes. If your brand has these two things, give Dosis a try!
How to use it for branding and marketing?
Dosis has many weights to support more complex projects like websites. Dosis Light and Regular look great in large sizes on their own or supported by other weights.
This font does have a personality and does not have a neutral tone. Be mindful if you want to use it for more complex things like app interfaces if you wish to have a more neutral voice.
img: Dosis being used on an apothecary e-commerce site; source: FontsinUse
Design Idea of the Week: Circular Symbols
Circular shapes are something we encounter every day, but how often do you consider their roles in visual creation? The circle has long been seen as a symbol with meanings such as fluidity, perfection, and wholeness.
Voltaire once said, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” Nadia Julien, the author of The Mammoth Dictionary of Symbols, said circle “implies an idea of movement, and symbolizes the cycle of time, the perpetual motion of everything that moves, the planets’ journey around the sun (the circle of the zodiac), the great rhythm of the universe.”
Are ideas of circles or circular motions and motifs, something you can use for your next marketing project?
img: ensō painting from Japan. ensō is a hand-drawn circle by one or two uninhibited brushstrokes. It symbolizes enlightenment, strength, and elegance; source: wikipedia
Color Inspiration of the Week: Orphism
Orphism was an offshoot of the Cubism art movement. Many art historians suspect this movement is what drew us closer to Abstract Art. Orphism paintings often featured pure abstraction and bright colors.
img: Sonia Delaunay became a leading painter in the Orphism movement; source: wikipedia
Creative Prompt
Can you create a visual for Twitter or Instagram using the font Dosis, circle as a symbol, or the color palette we featured today?
Thank you
…for reading and hanging out here this week! Dosis is available here.
img: Dosis infogrpahic
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Have more questions about design and fonts?
Please email me [email protected] or find me on Twitter at @HuaTweets.
You can also read the past issues on Typogram's blog.
