Swear Display Font

James Edmondson’s account of Swear begins with flat-brush experiments inspired by a visit to the Letrástica conference in Guadalajara. An unusual italic became the first digital direction, with the larger display forms preceding the reading sizes. Requests for a more conventional italic eventually led to a second treatment, while the earlier unconventional version was renamed Cilati. Swear Display belongs to that broader system; it should not be mistaken for a standalone font unrelated to its Text, Deck and Banner companions.

Read the publisher’s family page for the source account and the edition currently offered. Keep a family name distinct from its particular release, width or optical branch.

OH no offers Display in six weights with Roman, Italic and Cilati forms, making eighteen styles in that optical branch. Text is intended for paragraphs, Deck for larger paragraphs, Display for headings and Banner for the largest settings. Edmondson explains that the design reduces exterior serifs relative to interior ones to manage awkward spaces between letters. Compare the optical branch as well as the italic choice, since a headline drawing and a paragraph drawing solve different problems.

Use the original publisher specimen to inspect those features. An alternative can share a broad role without having the same letter shapes, metrics or character coverage.

Make a magazine opener with one large title, a short italic phrase and a body paragraph. Compare Italic and Cilati using the same phrase and scale before deciding how much contrast the page needs. Keep the reading passage in a text-oriented face instead of shrinking the display title style into it. Inspect capital pairs and punctuation in the actual heading, and adjust its line break before using added tracking to solve every uneven space.

For independent comparisons, try Playfair Display and Cormorant Garamond. Use the same wording and approximate output size. The related style guide provides broader design context.

Use OH no Type Co. to try the original and investigate the files, styles and terms for your intended workflow. This site does not distribute or serve Swear Display font software.

The editable alternatives here have their own source profiles and included licenses. For the difference between a font file and copied characters, read Unicode text versus fonts.