My thanks to Typotheque for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Zed, their incredible new font superfamily. Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. Typotheque tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a French ophthalmology hospital and found that Zed Text outperformed Helvetica in terms of reading speed across all patient groups. Designed from scratch to perform different functions, it comes in two optical versions — Text and Display — with four variable axes and support for 547 languages, including endangered ones.

Zed is extremely practical, both in terms of its extraordinarily broad language support and the stylistic variations available via its adjustable width, weight, roundness, and slant. It even offers Braille characters and an icon font. But Zed is also simply beautiful. It’s a font family and type system that exemplifies the belief that rich accessibility and pure aesthetic appeal are not at odds.

When you purchase a license for Zed, you’re buying it directly from the designers. It’s just lovely, and you should check it out. (Don’t miss the short introductory video, either.)