Lexend Giga

Set the same sentence in Lexend Giga and in Arial and Giga needs about half as much room again, 51% more by our count. Spacing is where the story of this family starts.

Bonnie Shaver-Troup, then an educational therapist in Silicon Valley, opened up the gaps between certain letters in the assignments of students who struggled with reading, dyslexic students among them, and saw both their reading and their comprehension improve. Her reading of that result is that many reading problems are visual at root, made worse by tight type. Lexend puts the idea into 7 families built to her Shaver-Troup Formulations, and Giga is the one on this page. Thomas Jockin is credited beside her, with Santiago Orozco, Héctor Gómez and Superunion on Google’s list too.

In June 2021 Font Bureau extended every Lexend family to a full weight range, which is where the 9 styles here come from, Thin up to Black. There is Vietnamese, a slashed zero, fractions, superscripts and subscripts.

Would we set a novel in it? Probably not. A line of Giga holds so few words that long text turns into a lot of line breaks, and a narrower face would do that job better in a column. Giga makes more sense where a reader meets 5 or 6 words at a time, an early reader, a label, a button in a learning app.