Geologica

The stroke endings in Geologica are cut square to the direction an imaginary pen was traveling. It is a detail you only catch at large sizes, and it gives away where the design comes from: a humanist sans, the pen-based kind, that has been pushed toward geometric construction to steady it.

Sindre Bremnes and Frode Helland drew it at the Monokrom foundry, starting in 2020, and Google Fonts added it in April 2023. They set it wide, spaced it generously and opened up the apertures, aiming at a serious text face with even color across a page. It covers Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese.

The variable version has 4 axes. Weight runs from 100 to 900, Slant tilts it by up to 12 degrees, Cursive swaps in cursive forms for some letters, and Sharpness, the odd one, adds the marks of a broad-nib pen: sharp points where the nib would meet the paper and crisp inner corners where curves finish. To us it is the best reason to try the variable file.

The 9 static weights cover Thin to Black with tabular figures, which makes the middle weights good for dashboards and tables, and the width helps small text on a phone. The Black gives sturdy headlines.