A specimen of Fraunces — Plate 03

One outline, every weight

( Fig. 01 )

The word inhales from hairline to heavyweight and back — a single number, the weight axis, moved by CSS. No video, no frames, no script.

The subject

( Note )

Fraunces is a soft, wonky old-style by Undercase Type, drawn by Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi. It is famous for axes that soften its terminals and tip it gently askew — those aren’t carried in our files, and rest here. This sheet works what is: weight, from hairline to black; optical size, quietly re-cutting every letter from caption to masthead; and the swap from roman to the italic — a true second cut. Every letter that follows is real, selectable text — performed by nothing but stylesheet.

The weight waterfall

( Fig. 02 )

Thin100Fraunces

ExtraLight200Fraunces

Light300Fraunces

Regular400Fraunces

Medium500Fraunces

SemiBold600Fraunces

Bold700Fraunces

ExtraBold800Fraunces

Black900Fraunces

Nine stops cut from a single variable file — no second font loaded to thicken the ink from thin to black.

Two tempers

( Fig. 03 )

Roman / Italic

Steady by day, spirited by night.

The italic is a separate cut with a livelier, hand-drawn slope — a redrawing, not a mechanical slant. Reach it with Tab, flip with Space.

Run your cursor across the line

( Fig. 04 )

Each letter is its own span, swelling toward its boldest self under the pointer and settling back. Purely for the pleasure of it — the line reads perfectly at rest, so a touch screen loses nothing.

Small things, writ large

( Fig. 05 )

&Ampersand

ffiLigature

gDouble-storey g

1234Old-style figures

QThe tail

aItalic single-storey a

A drawer of pangrams

( Fig. 06 )

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Black · 900

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

Italic · 420

The five boxing wizards jump quickly.

Light · 280

We build useful things; the letters play after hours.

House line · italic

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.

SemiBold · 640

→ Nudge the rail sideways; every card holds the alphabet in a different mood.

The grey page

( Fig. 07 )

Choose a setting

Fine caption Book reading Loud display

A typeface earns its keep here, not in the headline. Set a paragraph at reading size and the letterforms stop performing and start behaving — the rhythm of ascender and descender, the even colour of the block, the way a comma steadies a clause. Fraunces holds its warmth at text sizes without turning fussy.

Choose a preset and the same words resettle into a new density: a whisper for footnotes, a comfortable measure for prose, or a size that means to be overheard. One file does all three, and the page reflows without a single line of script.

Every letter is real

( Fig. 08 )

Nothing on this plate is a picture. Drag across this sentence and the highlight answers in vermilion — because it is type, all the way down.

An anatomy

( Fig. 09 )

a. The bowl

The bowl is the rounded stroke that encloses a counter — the pocket of white inside a lowercase a, b or o. In Fraunces the bowls are full and softly weighted, giving the face its generous, unhurried colour.

b. The ear

The ear is the small stroke reaching out from the top of a double-storey g. A tiny gesture, but where a serif shows its manners — Fraunces gives it a gentle, hand-drawn flick rather than a mechanical stub.

c. The terminal

A terminal is how a stroke ends where no serif finishes it — the curl atop an f, the tail of a j. These endings are where Fraunces keeps its softness, rounding off rather than cutting square.

d. The serif

The serif is the small foot that finishes a stem and seats the letter on its line. Old-style serifs like these bracket into the stroke on a curve, and that curve — multiplied across a paragraph — is most of a page's character.

( Colophon )

Set in Fraunces by Undercase Type and Space Grotesk, self-hosted as variable woff2. This plate moves the weight axis, lets optical sizing quietly re-cut every size from caption to masthead, and swaps roman for italic — a separate cut, not a slant. Fraunces’s celebrated SOFT and WONK axes aren’t carried in our files — admired from a distance, left to rest. One HTML file, no script. ✷