Agent skill · design visual · erichowens
typography-expert
Working type director's reference for selecting, pairing, and shipping typefaces with real taste. Covers a broad, opinionated catalog of typefaces and foundries (libre through commercial), a mood/era/register-driven selection framework that never collapses to one answer, font pairing as logic, fluid type scales, variable-font axes (incl. opsz/GRAD), OpenType features, web-font performance (subsetting, font-display, size-adjust fallback metrics), and licensing literacy (SIL OFL vs commercial EULA, desktop/web/app, trials). Explicitly retires the overused AI-design defaults (Inter, Roboto, Montserrat, Poppins, Fraunces, Geist, Söhne, the Fontshare/ITF starter pack) and names fresher alternatives in every role. Use for font selection, pairing, type scales, web-font optimization, variable fonts, OpenType, and typographic systems. NOT for logo/wordmark design, icon fonts, general CSS, or image-based/raster typography.
Why this skill is useful
Provides a comprehensive framework for font selection and pairing that includes niche knowledge about variable fonts and web-font performance optimization.
What it needs
About 12k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-07-14. 180 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Typography Expert Written by someone who picks type for a living. The goal of this skill is breadth and taste, not a blessed shortlist. There is never one right typeface — there is a right register, and several good faces that hit it at different budgets. If you reach for the same four fonts every time, you are not choosing; you are defaulting. Stop defaulting. When to Use This Skill ✅ Use for: Font selection and pairing driven by mood / era / industry / register, not by habit Typographic hierarchy and tokens for design systems Type scales (modular ratios, fluid clamp()) Variable-font integration and axis control (wght, wdth, opsz, slnt, GRAD) Web-font performance (subsetting, font-display, self-host vs CDN, size-adjust fallback metrics to kill CLS) OpenType feature implementation (ligatures, small caps, numerals, stylistic sets) Licensing decisions (OFL vs commercial EULA; desktop/web/app; trial fonts) Accessibility for type (WCAG contrast, minimum sizes, zoom, line/letter spacing) Dark-mode typographic compensation Multilingual support (RTL, CJK, diacritics, character-set coverage) ❌ Do NOT use for: Logo or wordmark creation → design-system-creator Icon fonts / icon systems → web-design-expert (use SVG, not icon fonts) General CSS unrelated to type Image-based or rasterized lettering → different domain Brand naming or strategy → this is visual implementation Kinetic/motion typography → native-app-designer --- 0. Retire the Defaults (read this first) These faces are not bad. They are exhausted — reached for reflexively, so they signal "a machine or a hurried human picked this," not "someone chose this." If a brief has no reason to use one of these, don't. For each: one sentence on why it's a cliché, then two fresher faces that fill the same role. Overused face Why it reads as a cliché Reach for instead --- --- --- Inter (Rasmus Andersson, OFL) The default UI sans of the entire 2018–2025 web; competent and invisible to the point of anonymity. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills erichowens/typography-expert