Colophon
EM DASH is printed on the web in two variable fonts — one for the shouting, one for the talking — with a monospaced voice for the margins. There are no images anywhere in this journal: every figure, cover and ornament is made of letterforms.
1 Display — Roboto Flex
Headlines, covers and specimen mode are set in Roboto Flex, Font Bureau’s 2022 re-engineering of Roboto for Google — a variable font carrying thirteen axes. This journal uses four of them: weight (100–1000), width (25–151), optical size (8–144) and slant (−10–0). Every kinetic headline on these pages is one file sliding along its axes; the monumental cuts and the condensed trade-card caps are the same font at different coordinates.
2 Text — Newsreader
The reading matter is Newsreader, a Production Type family designed for long-form text on screens, with a real optical-size axis (6–72) and a lovely italic — the italic ampersand you see dressed in red throughout the issue is Newsreader’s. Optical size is tracked automatically by the browser: small print gets the sturdier drawing, display lines the finer one, the way sizes were always meant to work.
3 Meta — Roboto Mono
Marginalia, footnotes, kickers and controls are set in Roboto Mono (wght 100–700). Small caps in this issue are honest letterspaced capitals — the tradition the typewriter invented and the typographer adopted.
4 Ink & paper
Ink is #181410 on paper #F4EFE2; the signal red is #D02410, used for exactly one job: marking the living parts — the em dash in the wordmark, the ampersands, the reading progress, the furniture. Type settles to rest; motion always ends in legibility. If your system asks for reduced motion — or you flip the switch in the header — every kinetic headline arrives already composed, and the journal reads as a still, well-set page.
5 The mark
The wordmark is an em dash wearing red — the punctuation mark this journal is named for. An em dash — like this one — is the width of an em, the square the type is drawn on. It is the pause, the aside, the interruption that turns out to be the point.
EM DASH is a journal of letterforms. Issue Nº 09 was set in variable type in September MMXXVI and printed on the web — a medium that finally learned to interpolate.