Noto Serif Display

A serif for the big sizes, in 3 alphabets. Noto is Google’s attempt at a font for every modern and ancient language, and most of it is made of text faces; Noto Serif Display is the modulated design it keeps for large settings in European Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. Google added it in November 2020, with the drawing done by Monotype.

The family here runs to 18 styles, 9 weights from Thin to Black with an italic for each, and 2,840 characters in every one of them. That is a lot of ground for a headline face. It reaches Vietnamese and the extended Greek and Cyrillic blocks too, so a polytonic Greek title or a Serbian one stays in the same font as the English beside it.

Display faces often skip the typesetting kit. This one did not:

• small caps, plus a feature that turns capitals into them
• old style and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional spacing
• fractions, ordinals and a slashed zero
• 1 stylistic set

Is the italic any use in a headline? Yes, mostly because it sets a shade narrower than the roman, so an italic phrase in a deck line hardly moves the rag.

We would put it at 40 px and over, on a magazine cover or a book jacket, and hand the paragraphs to a face cut for reading sizes. Thin and Extra Light are cover weights and nothing else.