Project 3: Typesetting
Researching Roboto Slab
I started off by learning more about the background of my typeface, looking at the people who created it, the use cases it was designed for, and the roles it fills after its release. Looking into the larger Material Design typographic system gave me clues on its origins and its intended applications that informed the design of the individual letterforms.
Next, I looked at the physical characteristics of the typeface itself. After downloading a copy of Roboto Slab from Google Fonts, I blew up the letterforms and annotated key features I saw. Roboto Slab’s slightly angled serifs, tall x-height, and blend of fat curves with straight verticals made for a fun, playful font that still could pull double-duty as either title or body copy.
Adjectives
From my initial research, I pulled out a list of adjectives that described the typeface. I wanted to emphasize its utilitarian background yet subtle personality that challenged expectations of what a slab serif could be used for. These adjectives applied to both Roboto Slab’s form or how it was used.
Modern, Effortless, Friendly, Rhythmic, Approachable, Adaptable, Flexible, Universal
Long Essay
The essay was more focused on giving the reader some insight into the typographic space that Roboto Slab was created in. I made sure to cover the unique size and legibility challenges that the designers at Google had to solve when developing their Material Design system and how Roboto Slab’s geometry helped address these core concerns. An underlying theme behind the system was its adaptability, something I brought up in both its past context and the way Google has updated the font post-release, introducing more weights and making the typeface fully variable in 2019.
The Roboto family is defined by its adaptability. In the turn of the 21st century, digital devices became increasingly ubiquitous. Everything — from phones to refrigerators — started to connect with one another. Suddenly, a typeface needed to work on a 2” watch screen, an 80” Smart TV, and everything in between. It had to be legible enough for users to read instantly off a car’s dashboard when driving yet remain invisible enough to be Android’s primary typeface. In this ever-changing digital landscape, Google’s design team was confronted with a unique challenge: How do we create a type system that works across it all?
Their solution was Roboto, a geometric family of typefaces in their larger Material Design system that was crafted to be flexible, friendly, and most importantly, universal. Google’s in-house team of designers, led by Christian Robertson, released the original Roboto family in 2011, and Roboto Slab in 2013, to replace its aging sibling Droid Sans. The first iteration of Roboto Slab came in four different weights: Thin, Light, Regular, and Bold.
Roboto Slab emphasizes its friendly nature through its seemingly contradictory blend of large, rounded curves and geometric letterforms. Its straight-edged capitals and tall x-height help increase its readability across a wide range of screen sizes. Roboto Slab’s large counters and narrow apertures gave it an approachable yet distinctly modern appearance that matched its content. Unlike its more clinical, clean counterparts like Apple’s San Francisco or Microsoft’s Segoe UI, its angled, open terminals and slightly slanted serifs keep its personality playful and interesting. The designers gave special attention to the letterform’s dimensions, letting each letter stretch or shrink to its own width to give it a rhythmic, almost effortless reading experience. Compared to its predecessor Droid Sans, Roboto Slab’s more condensed letterforms could fit more content into the same amount of space without feeling tight or compressed.
Since its release, the Roboto family has grown into its own. Whether on Android, YouTube, or Google Maps, the typeface has become synonymous with the modern web. However, Roboto’s adaptability extends beyond just its letterforms or its use cases. Ever since its initial 2011 launch, Google’s Material Design team has been constantly innovating the family to fit the modern digital age. In 2014, the team tweaked the Roboto family to improve its legibility. In 2019, Roboto Slab got five new weights, expanding the number of styles to include nine different thicknesses. Furthermore, the update also introduced variable weights to Roboto Slab, which let typographers generate every possible font weight from 100 to 900. Font families like Roboto have evolved alongside the digital age and filled its corresponding typographic needs. The story of Roboto isn’t just about its friendly personality or incredible flexibility, but it also reflects the role of typography in our everyday lives.
Short Writing
For the 50 word description of the typeface, I tried to include only the most important details of my long-form story. I broke the short piece into two main sections to address the typeface forms themselves and the larger design system that Roboto Slab was a part of. I made sure to finish off on a few of the most important adjectives to give the reader something to remember the typeface by.
Roboto Slab
Geometric yet curved, rhythmic yet playful
Large counters, narrow apertures, angled serifs
Tall x-height, natural spacingRoboto Family
Android, YouTube, Google Maps
Designed for the digital age
Constantly evolving, constantly improving
Any device, any size, any weight
To fit a typographic needAdaptable, invisible, ubiquitous
Material Design in miniature
Thumbnails
Drawing thumbnails for possible spread ideas helped me see a wide range of ideas quickly and pick out aspects that worked well. I began by loosely sketching different variations of possible geometric shapes, blown-up letterforms, and images that fit the theme of Roboto Slab, highlighting where I wanted to draw the reader’s attention with a grey marker. I challenged the sides of the page and the center gutter to see how elements that pushed against the boundary or crossed the gutter could pull the eye from one block of content to another.
Once I felt like I got out most of my “bad” gut-reaction ideas, I printed out a set of thumbnails with 12-column grids to make tighter versions of elements that worked from my first set. I tried playing with variations where the images were the primary draw, some were a bolded or highlighted block of type was the focus, and some with only the letterform to see it felt.
InDesign Sketches
Moving into InDesign, I translated many of my initial ideas onto the grid of the document with varying levels of success. Since my essay was quite long (around 450 words), I wanted to split one piece of content off to give one portion that was around 100 words and the primary copy of around 300 words as the main body copy. However, I found that splitting the type up made for a generally clunky layout with two fairly large pieces of type of similar hierarchy.
While there were many high-profile use cases for Roboto Sans (YouTube, Google Maps, etc.), much fewer existed for Roboto Slab. I wanted to get a better idea of how designers have leveraged its strengths in the wild and how it had grown into its own over the years to see if it could inform my decisions on contextual elements or shape language to include in my spread. I looked for examples of Roboto Slab as both title and body copy and made notes on what seemed to work well, what impression the typeface gave to the content, and how it interacted with other elements to create an identity.
Tuesday Feedback
- main objectives: typesetting and
- learn how to set readable, long-form, intentional text
- not about the spread spread, make sure the type is the goal
- how does the design elements respond to the letterforms? is it short & stout vs. dainty and delicate
- 45–75 char per line in info palette
- focus more on the typesetting, layout secondary, print a lot!
- letterform proportions > design elements > negative space
- line length & size are related to keeping it within that measure range & rag
- add some sort of a start here signal → whitespace, bold line, drop cap, etc.
- narrow vs. wide give different moments/moods of the copy
- work through type studies to figure out body copy & rag
video 4 notes
- affordance of sound, pacing/tempo, colors, etc.
- narrative & storyboards give energy & movement to the type
- what is the movement of roboto slab? bouncing? etc.
- what is the appropriate sound? jazz? piano? drums? ambient? etc.
- when is the typeface name mentioned? building suspense?
Type Studies
I then moved onto studying the individual letterforms to see how to set the body type in a way that matched the larger typeface. I knew that Roboto sans would be the obvious choice for a complementary font for the slab, since they had the same x-height and were designed around each other. The “R” letter worked well for representing my typeface since it had both a strong vertical element and a rounded curve. Playing with the weight, size, and letter case gave a rough set of dimensions to guide my column shapes when setting type.
Using the same 12-column grid as before, I tried different variations with both the width and number of columns. Some layouts, like the two five-wide columns or the three four-wide columns seemed to accomodate the type itself well but felt at odds with the overall shape of the letterform. I found that by keeping the leading quite open, I could get away with dropping the type size all the way down to 8.25 to accomodate more characters on a line. I was drawn to both the single five-wide column and three three-wide column iterations, which fit the proportions of the letterform in an interesting and complimentary way.
Printing out different variations helped me check for readability and rag in much more intuitive, physical ways than I could on screen. Some elements, like the bolded first line, had very different amounts of emphasis in print vs. on screen. I ended up deciding on going with the three column skinny layout for the way it interacted with the negative space on the page.
notes
- highlighting features → color? identifying weights? key features?
- maybe moving around the “material design in miniature” somewhere else?
- try aligning to x-height instead of cap height
- play around with gutter, see how things can cross and break rules
- generally smaller type → leading
- how to draw the reader into the text copy itself?
- go for strong opening moment + draw, even if minimal
- how to use color, shapes, tying symmetrical moments, etc. to pull reader in
When creating the supporting elements, I wanted to have bold pops of color that highlighted the fun, delightful parts of Roboto Slab. I tried different colored backgrounds, but my body copy in such a thin weight made it hard to read, even when the background was a light tan. I ended up making the background white on the right side but changed the text color itself to tie it in with the opposite page. I also included some abstract shapes to give movement from one side to another and challenge the edges and gutter of the spread. The slightly offset bar highlighting the first line of the text futher mirrored the design language on the left side while providing a clear entry point into the body copy.
I wanted the reflect and celebrate the quirky and distinct aspects of the typeface through graphical elements, without needing supporting text to describe them. Since the colored circle was already over the rounded part of the letterform and the angled bands of color overlapped the angled serif in the bottom right, I wanted to choose colors that emphasize their relationships with each other. The end result both highlights the unique, playful aspects of the letterform while also celebrating the counter forms within the typeface.
Thursday Feedback
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