Core Brand Fonts
Calibri is our brand’s typeface for use in long form editorial and internal communications.
Gotham is our brand’s typeface for use in all marketing, collateral, and signage. It has a friendly, confident feel and comes in a range of weights to fit every design need. Gotham is a typeface produced by Hoefler & Co. type foundry. The typeface is not included within the Microsoft Windows environment. Contact brand@watermission.org for usage in your communications projects.
Gotham Light
Gotham Light is our default typeface for body copy (other than digital and, in some cases, long form—see Calibri Font above).
Gotham Book
Use Gotham Book in body or other copy when Light isn’t legible over the background or a slightly heavier weight is needed.
Gotham Medium
Use Gotham Medium to create hierarchy for elements such as subheads and pull-quotes, and for short body copy over imagery when there’s a need for increased readability.
Gotham Bold
Use Gotham Bold for important hierarchical elements like headlines. With its heavy weight, it’s a real stand-out over imagery.
Standard Body Copy Size
For both Gotham and Calibri, our standard minimum size requirement is 10pt type/14pt leading. This size allows for easy readability in both fonts. Remember, if the font size goes up or down, the leading should be adjusted as not to eliminate the space between sentences. Not adjusting for leading causes difficulty in readability in both reversed and standard application.
Leading
Leading is the distance between two baselines of lines of type. The word originates from the strips of lead hand-typesetters used to use to space out lines of text evenly. The word leading has stuck, but essentially it’s a typographer’s term for line spacing.
Leading is one of the quickest and simplest tweaks you can do to make your text look instantly better.
If you’re working in design software like Adobe InDesign, the program will set a default leading value whenever you type up more than one line of text. However, this is not usually generous enough, and can make paragraphs look squashed. This works fine if you’re creating a crammed front page for a newspaper, but less well for most other purposes.
Kerning
Kerning is the process of increasing or decreasing the space between individual characters, adjusting the position of letters in relation to others. It’s commonly used on prominent pieces of text, such as headlines and logos. Note that tracking is used to adjust the letter-spacing uniformly over a range of characters. Although the process of tweaking kerning may be very subtle, it can have significant effects on the legibility and overall presentation of text.
Graphic Designers kern letters to improve the overall symmetry of a word or phrase, which the default tracking settings provided in the font file may not be able to achieve alone.
It’s critical to always use optical (rather than metric) kerning with Gotham and Calibri. Without optical kerning, characters such as the W and A appear to have no space before them, resulting in the appearance of errors.