Wagtail Brand Font

The issue of font choice recently came up in https://github.com/wagtail/sphinx_wagtail_theme/issues/120

@allcaps mentioned in a discussion on slack about Wagtail finding a font for use in docs, and elsewhere, that is distinctly Wagtail. Generally speaking I think providing reusable resources of any kind is a net positive for helping strengthen the Wagtail ecosystem.

Currently there is a mix on fonts in use:

• Wagtail Admin: Open Sans
• Wagtail website and docs: Apercu (this aligns with Torchbox branding)
• sphinx_wagtail_theme package has recently switched to Source Sans due to legal reasons, as a stop-gap measure until a more suitable replacement is found.

The issue referenced above means we cannot legally distribute Apercu with the Wagtail docs pip package, nor can the Apercu font files legally be committed on GitHub.

With the new Wagtail admin design refresh on the horizon, it seems like an opportunity to make font usage (and other branding elements such as colors) consistent between the various parts of the Wagtail ecosystem.

I personally have no opinion in the matter, other than consistency. Here are a couple options:

• Wagtail community as a whole centers on an open source font.
• Torchbox (or other sponsor) purchases a special font license that permits redistribution within the confines of the Wagtail ecosystem. Perhaps Colophon (maker of Apercu) or a smaller boutique font foundry would be willing to make special dispensation (for a fee)? This is a similar arrangement of how Apple licenses Helvetica to be distributed with macOS.
• Volunteer or paid consultant makes a custom font for the Wagtail org. Usually such an endeavor starts as a fork of a robust open source font and tweaks the glyphs (e.g. start with Source Sans and modify the glyphs to look wagtail-ish).

[nmorduch]

I agree with following Bootstrap’s approach: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.1/content/reboot/#native-font-stack. I was also looking at similar references in the docs of Any Design though I don’t remember how I got there (maybe from a search engine?)

I was worried about overriding fonts, for example if people use the Dyslexie typeface, so I checked out their Chrome extension and it does a fine job of overriding font choices except if it’s trying to override !important styles, so we should be extra sure to avoid using !important.

My other concern with a font stack like this is font weights. Not only because, as @vsalvino noted, fonts show lighter on Windows, but also because not every font is going to have a lot of weights available. So we should make sure that anytime we use font weight to convey semantic information, that does not get lost using a font like Dyslexie (which, as far as I can tell, has only two weights).

[Scotchester]

Windows machines that don’t have Segoe UI – apparently that’s Windows XP, Vista, 7, and potentially some versions of Windows Server

Segoe UI became the Windows system font beginning in Vista (and Server 2008). See its Wikipedia entry (first paragraph) and Microsoft documentation.