Typography for Zed Display Typeface
Sans-serif shaped by ophthalmology lab research
Zed Display is the display optical variant of Typotheque's Zed (released 2024), a minimalist sans-serif type system built around accessibility and inclusivity. Letter proportions were informed by acuity tests conducted at the National Centre of Ophthalmology in Paris, and the family was tested with visually impaired readers. The project spans a five-axis variable design space—weight, width, skew, rounding, and optical size—and is being extended to cover scripts including Arabic, Armenian, Devanagari, Georgian, Hebrew, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many others. It received a Gold European Design Award 2024 and TDC Typographic Excellence 2026.
Set in Zed Display
Insights
- Typotheque conducted reading acuity tests at the National Centre of Ophthalmology in Paris; Zed Text outperformed Helvetica in reading speed for hospital patients, according to the foundry.
- The family comprises two radically distinct optical versions—text and display—rather than adapting a single design across sizes.
- A fifth variable axis controls optical size by adjusting letterform shape and internal white space for a fixed physical size.
- Braille characters are included in the glyph set, developed after an extensive literature review of regional Braille usage.
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