Stadia
Stadia Regular
Stadia Outline
Typography is the design and arrangement of the simple graphic glyphs that embody language. A typeface conveys tone and emotion, often before a single word is read. Each character is shaped by centuries of use, misuse, and reinvention; these glyphs aren’t static, they mutate to reflect shifts in culture and technology. Type carries the fossil imprints of its evolution: the serifs of the Roman chisel, the flourish of pen on parchment, and more recently, the mechanical construction of pixels and Bézier curves. The anatomy of a typeface – its ascenders, bowls, terminals, x-height – operates as a kind of dialect; a grotesque sans and a humanist serif speak with very different inflections. Typography is rarely neutral – it encodes values like reliability, luxury, rebellion, sincerity, intimacy. True geometry rarely reads well to the human eye. Letters must often be subtly distorted to look correct. Circular letters like “O” overshoot the baseline and cap height to appear optically aligned; vertical and horizontal strokes differ in thickness to appear equal. These imperceptible adjustments are foundational to good type design.
Stadia Regular
Typography is the design and arrangement of the simple graphic glyphs that embody language. A typeface conveys tone and emotion, often before a single word is read. Each character is shaped by centuries of use, misuse, and reinvention; these glyphs aren’t static, they mutate to reflect shifts in culture and technology. Type carries the fossil imprints of its evolution: the serifs of the Roman chisel, the flourish of pen on parchment, and more recently, the mechanical construction of pixels and Bézier curves. The anatomy of a typeface – its ascenders, bowls, terminals, x-height – operates as a kind of dialect; a grotesque sans and a humanist serif speak with very different inflections. Typography is rarely neutral – it encodes values like reliability, luxury, rebellion, sincerity, intimacy. True geometry rarely reads well to the human eye. Letters must often be subtly distorted to look correct. Circular letters like “O” overshoot the baseline and cap height to appear optically aligned; vertical and horizontal strokes differ in thickness to appear equal. These imperceptible adjustments are foundational to good type design.
Stadia Outline
Stadia Character Set
About
Stadia is designed around a series of modular units: quartercircles, teardrop shapes, squares, circles and variations thereon. The versatility of these basic shapes is such that a teardrop, for example, can represent a looped bowl, as in the lower part of the a, while also representing a curved arc at the top of the same character. The strict grid is broken for the T and the Y, and the placement of accents. The alternative – basing a T, for example, across three units – though rational, is far less aesthetically pleasing. As always with type design, one has to know when the internal structural rules should be bent for a more beautiful result. The horizontal lines appear to travel through the letters, bursting into stars in the counters of lower-case characters such as the o and p. The outline version is weighted to the same width as the gaps between the units.
