Cabin

Look at where Cabin’s curved strokes end. They are cut off at a 10 degree angle, a small tilt you only notice when the type is large, and it is 1 of a few quiet signatures in the family: E and F have shorter middle arms than you might expect, and the M splays its legs outward.

The bones come from Edward Johnston and Eric Gill, whose humanist sans faces Pablo Impallari took as his model, and he mixed in modern proportions, optical adjustments and a few traits of the geometric sans. The strokes are close to monolinear, though the tops and bottoms of curves are thinned slightly. The counters of b, g, p and q are rounded and optically corrected.

Many hands have touched it. Impallari drew it, Igino Marini’s iKern system did the spacing and kerning, and Kalapi Gajjar-Bordawekar later improved and extended the family, with help from Marc Foley and Lasse Fister; Google Fonts also credits Rodrigo Fuenzalida.

The family runs from Regular to Bold in 4 weights, each with a true italic that runs 6.9% narrower than its roman. The variable version adds a width axis that goes down to condensed. Language coverage is wide: Western, Central and South-Eastern European, plus full Vietnamese.

It is an easy, friendly workhorse. We would hand it a whole website, headings and body both, and only reach for something else if the brand needed a sharper voice.